High Flight Page 12

  There were four small tables each with a crisp white tablecloth and silver service in the tastefully appointed room. They served themselves from a buffet along one wall and sat at one of the tables by a large window that looked out across the city.

  “When you get back to Washington ask your friends for some information,” Karyagin said.

  “I told General Polunin that I will not spy on my country for you,” McGarvey said.

  “I’m not asking you to become a traitor, merely to ask for some help.”

  “With what?”

  “How will the United States react when the public finally learns what happened in the Tatar Strait?”

  “We’ll probably read about it in the New York Times or Washington Post in the next few days,” McGarvey said. “But frankly I don’t think the average American will give a damn. You’ve been our enemy since 1945, and there’s no love just now for the Japanese. So I imagine that most Americans will view that attack as nothing more than a minor squabble.”

  “But Japan has vast economic ties with the United States.”

  Well put, McGarvey thought, though stranglehold might have been a more accurate choice of words. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “By reaction, I meant the White House’s reaction. How will your President respond?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Karyagin,” McGarvey said. “And even if I still worked for the CIA, I wouldn’t know that. Only a few of the President’s closest advisers would be privy to such information. And if I could get to them, which I cannot, I wouldn’t do it.”

  “The crux of the matter is what would your country do if we retaliated in some way for the attack against us in our home waters?”

  “Is that what you’re planning to do?”

  “It’s a distinct possibility, Mr. McGarvey.”

  “As you say, Japan has vast economic ties with my country. They are our allies.”

  Karyagin stared at McGarvey without altering his expression, yet it was clear that the comment had hit home. The Russians were in a dicey situation. If they did something overtly to disturb the Americans, what aid and support they were getting from Washington and from companies like Guerin would dry up. On the other hand, if they let the Japanese incursion into waters they claimed were Russian go unchallenged, and the destruction of their naval vessel go unrevenged, it would happen again and again until their eastern border was no longer secure. The situation was intolerable.

  “If Cuba attacked and sank one of your Navy or Coast Guard ships off the Florida coast, the White House would react.”

  “It most certainly would,” McGarvey said. “But if it had happened ten years ago when Cuba was still your ally, would you have risked war to help them out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I, Mr. Karyagin. But I do know that we have satellites keeping a close watch on what’s going on. Whatever you do we’ll know about it. But how my President will react I cannot predict. In fact, your people probably have a better reading on it than I do. Yemlin runs Washington with a sharp eye.”

  “General Murphy is very close to the President.”

  McGarvey allowed himself to smile. “As I said, I’m not privy to the President’s advisers, not even the general.”

  “But you’re concerned about the Japanese.”

  “Wary. We think a zaibatsu may have been formed to ruin Guerin Airplane Company.”

  “In order to acquire the technological developments that the company has made on this new airliner?”

  “That’s right. My government refuses to help us because it would show favoritism of one industry over another and would involve the government directly in industry.”

  “Foolish of them,” Karyagin said. “We don’t have such constraints.”

  Or a lot of other things, the thought occurred to McGarvey. “We believe that this Japanese group will do anything to reach its goal.”

  “Including murder?”

  “Yes, including murder.”

  Karyagin glanced at General Polunin, a bleak look suddenly in his eyes. “We’ve heard nothing about this from our Tokyo operation?”

  “That is correct, Mr. Director,” Polunin said.

  Karyagin turned back to McGarvey. “What will happen to our deal if we don’t find out what you need to know?”

  “It would be a moot point in that case,” McGarvey said, “because Guerin would no longer be an American company.”

  “By coming here and speaking with us, you could be construed as a traitor.”

  “I represent a manufacturing company that wishes to make an offer to build a commercial aircraft assembly plant here, equip it, and train its personnel. Of course, before any such agreement could be finalized we would need the export licenses. But the legal people say that will present no serious problem. Will you help us?”

  “Yes, of course we will,” Karyagin said, as if there’d never been a doubt in anyone’s mind. “But you too must understand that if the situation between us and the Japanese government deteriorates, working with your company could become a moot point for us.”

  “I understand.”

  It had taken nearly forty-eight hours before Bruno Mueller was finally out of Europe. The automobile he had stolen from the Munich Airport had been returned in the morning by one of the general’s staff, who that night drove Mueller across the border into Austria.

  In Vienna, Mueller was handed over to another associate of the general, who’d driven him to Budapest, where the next afternoon, with new papers identifying him as Karl Steiner, a businessman from Stuttgart, he was able to board a Czechoslovak Airlines 747 direct to Washington’s Dulles International Airport.

  Customs and immigration passed him through after only a couple of very routine questions, and the Yellow cab with the roof number 659 was waiting for him as he’d been instructed. By midnight he was knocking at the door of a very large and very old farmhouse a few kilometers west of the airport, the cab’s taillights disappearing in the darkness down the long driveway.

  America, he thought. One week ago he would never have believed it possible. There was, however, no doubt in his mind that he was a fugitive, and that whatever opportunity the general had arranged for him was his last chance.

  A bulky old man with a thick nose and white hair, wearing a moth-eaten sweater and brown corduroy trousers, answered the door. “You’re Mueller?” he asked, the words slurred.

  “That’s right,” Mueller replied in English. “The General sent me.”

  The old man let him in, then closed and locked the door. “Did you have any trouble getting here?”

  Mueller shook his head. To the right the stair hall opened into a comfortably furnished living room. A fire was on the grate. To the left was a dining room, beyond which an open door led into the kitchen. A short corridor led to the back of the house. The place smelled pleasantly of wood smoke and pipe tobacco.

  “Your room is upstairs, first on the right. Put your things away, and then come back down. I want to talk to you before I leave.”

  Mueller looked closer at the old man, especially his eyes, which were watery, and his complexion, which was mottled red. The man was a heavy drinker and was drunk now, or nearly drunk, he decided. Not so good, but the general never made mistakes.

  “You’re going away?”

  “Into the city. My home is in Georgetown.”

  “What about this place?” Mueller asked.

  “I own this house as well, but very few people know about it. I use it from time to time for … various things.”

  Mueller cocked an ear to listen, but the only sounds in the house were the crackling of the fire on the grate. “Is there anyone else here?”

  “Not yet,” the old man said. “But someone else will be coming to help you.”

  “With what?” Mueller asked.

  “In due time, Colonel.” The old man motioned toward the stairs. “Put your things away. I’ll fix you a drink.”

  “What do I call you?”
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  The old man studied him for a second before he answered. “Edward R. Reid,” he said. “Your general and I go back a long way together to when he first worked for the BND.”

  Mueller’s eyes narrowed in surprise. “Do you know what I am?”

  “You’re an assassin who the West Germans would like to eliminate.”

  “West Germans?”

  “Germans,” Reid corrected himself.

  “Knowing this, you have work for me?”

  Reid nodded.

  “Do you understand the consequences if you are discovered and arrested?”

  “I’m an old man, colonel,” Reid said. “And I don’t frighten easily.”

  “I’m not an old man, and I do frighten easily, so you will be very careful for my sake. When I am cornered I fight back. If I am betrayed, I kill my betrayers. And if this is to be the time and place of my death, then I will take a great many with me. Police, soldiers, civilians … you.”

  “Put your things away,” Reid said after a moment. “I believe that you will work out just fine.”

  “It was too easy,” McGarvey said.

  “Turn your back on it,” Yemlin replied as their limousine was passed through the east gate at Sheremeteyvo Airport. “We have the resources and we’re experts at the game. You’ll be sucked in until all your choices but one will be gone.”

  “Is that what Karyagin means to do?”

  “He’s a desperate man, Kirk. You’re going to have to understand how it really is with us here. General Polunin is snapping at his heels from below, just waiting for him to make a mistake. While Yeltsin and that crowd in the Kremlin are pressuring him from above for answers he simply cannot give them. And you know what happens in this country when you can’t give your masters the answers they want to hear.”

  McGarvey looked away for a moment. A light breeze had sprung up that made for some fantastic wind-chill numbers. Yemlin had always been a pragmatist. Even during the interrogations and his later visits to the hospital at Volodga, he’d spoken only of practical matters. “What will your families do now? Can we get word to them? Are you reasonably comfortable? Are you certain that nothing can be offered you in exchange for further information?” Maybe it was still the same now.

  “Why are you telling me this, Viktor?”

  “I always thought you were a good man. A little ahead of your time but basically decent. You proved that by taking poor Tania as far as you did. Baranov was no friend of the Rodina. Let’s say I want you to come into this operation with your eyes open. If it fails it could be disastrous for your company, and you personally.”

  “You could be fired for telling me this.”

  Yemlin had to smile. “I already have been. I’m no longer Washington rezident.”

  “You’re not flying back with me this morning?”

  “No, Kirk. But I will be returning to Washington soon.”

  “To do what?” McGarvey asked him.

  “To act as your handler, of course,” Yemlin said. “My boss thinks that you and I have a special relationship. Sometimes this sort of a bond develops between the interrogator and his subject. It was me who you first approached for help.”

  “You were the logical choice.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe I’ll kill you when I get the chance. I have the motive.”

  “Then they will have been proved wrong.”

  “Perhaps I’ll use you.”

  “By all means,” Yemlin said. “There’s nothing a great Russian loves more than intrigue. You know all about it.”

  “Again, why tell me this?” McGarvey asked, although he already knew the answer.

  “Because you’re no good to us unless your eyes are wide open. We’re talking about international industrial espionage. Your company is hiring a Russian federal agency to work for it, in violation certainly of many of your laws, and even some of our own. The quid pro quo remains information in trade for information.”

  “In addition to the assembly factory.”

  “As you say, Kirk, without information for both sides, the factory becomes a moot point.”

  The limousine took them directly to the ramp where the same airliner that had brought them from Washington was being readied for the return flight. The other passengers were still in the terminal waiting for the first boarding call.

  “Get some sleep, Kirk. I’ll see you in a couple of days.”

  McGarvey got his single overnight bag and got out of the car. Before he walked across to the waiting aircraft he turned back.

  “Perhaps I will kill you before this is all over, Viktor Pavlovich.”

  Yemlin shrugged, but it was clear that the remark bothered him. “We’ll see.”

  Five bells went off in the operations room of the U.S. Navy Seventh Fleet’s Intelligence Unit at Yokosuka, Japan, indicating a FLASH-priority message was incoming on the ready circuit from the Pentagon.

  Z072315ZJAN

  TOP SECRET

  FM: CINCPACCOM

  TO: CINC 7TH FLEET

  SUBJECT: READINESS STATUS

  1. 7TH FLEET NORTHERN OPERATIONS TO INCLUDE GUAM BUT NOT XX RPT NOT XX INDIAN OCEAN DETACHMENT ARE ORDERED TO DEFCON 4.

  2. THIS IS NOT XX RPT NOT XX A COMMANDWIDE UPGRADE.

  3. EVIDENCE CONCENTRATED RUSSIAN NAVAL FORCES IN TATAR STRAIT VICINITY 47-42-3IN XXX 140-32-OOE.

  4. REQUEST ID AND PRESENT WHEREABOUTS OF JAPANESE MSDF SUBMARINE RESPONSIBLE FOR ATTACK OF 04—01—97.

  5. USE OF ALL APPLICABLE LOCAL RESOURCES AUTHORIZED, BUT UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MUST MSDF BECOME AWARE OF YOUR INVESTIGATION.

  Chief Signalman Joseph Woodmark, Jr., tore the message off the printer and hand-carried it back to the duty officer’s cubicle. They’d been expecting something like this to come, and the search for the MSDF submarine had already begun. So far as the traffic Woodmark had seen coming through operations indicated, the brass was looking for the Samisho, which had left Yokosuka ten days ago. But no one had expected the upgraded defense condition. DEFCON 5 was normal, and DEFCON I meant war. Four was nothing more than a preliminary precaution, but it was on the way up.

  Lieutenant, j.g. Jan Mills took the dispatch, logged it in the Top Secret control book, and shook his head. “Somebody’s smoking something in D.C.,” he said, picking up the phone and punching in the fleet commander’s office. “First they’re late asking us to look around, and then they up the ante a notch.”

  Last night he’d watched a video tape of the Pearl Harbor movie Tora! Tora! Tora! and now he felt unsettled.

  SIX

  Facing northeast toward the Columbia River and southwest across the city, Guerin Airplane Company’s staff headquarters was housed in a sprawling glass and aluminum-framed four-story building at Portland International Airport. Nearly five thousand executives and engineers worked there. Along with the seventy-five thousand welders and riveters, tool and die makers, machinists and designers, electronics experts and metallurgists, chemists, mathematicians, and a host of other specialists in various facilities around the city and up at Forest Grove and Gales Creek, Guerin was by far Portland’s largest employer. And, like Boeing in Seattle, the gigantic aircraft company dominated nearly every aspect of the city, from its taxes to its Monday-through-Friday traffic made worse this morning because of a rare snowstorm that had begun overnight. Three lanes of cars and vans streamed through the main gates into the parking lot, which was being plowed and sanded even as the day shift was showing up.

  Like most upper-level Guerin executives, Kennedy had a limousine and driver at his disposal. The presidents of almost every other division made use of the privilege, claiming it gave them much needed time to and from work to review paperwork. But often he drove his own car. It gave him the time to clear his head. To get ready for the day and to come down after a long one.

  This morning, however, he found it difficult to think about anything other than the Japanese, and Chairman of the Board Al Vasilanti’s intransigence when it came to them. It had cau
sed them trouble before, but they’d always managed to sidestep the issue or dig themselves out of whatever hole they’d been placed in.

  During the final design stages of the P522’s fly-by-wire system in the mid-eighties, Mitsubishi had come up with a new design application for its CPU that made the computer-to-sensor interface one hundred times as fast and as accurate at half the cost, as the American designed and built application.

  The logical step, of course, would have been to subcontract the system to the Japanese. But Vasilanti had been adamantly against working with them, and he’d convinced the board of directors to go along with him, promising that American Micro Devices was on the verge of a better design.

  AMD had come up with a system that was at least as good as Mitsubishi’s. Whether by luck or by inside information, Vasilanti came out smelling like a rose.

  This time there was no miracle looming six months down the road, unless McGarvey was successful, or unless Congress passed an act protecting them from a Japanese takeover—something he did not think Washington was ready to do considering the fact that the United States had become the world’s largest debtor nation and Japan had become one of the largest purchasers of that debt.

  As one U.S. Senator had told him off the record last year, “We’re beholden to the little bastards.” It was a double-edged sword.

  Parking the four-wheel-drive Range Rover in his slot in the heated executive garage, Kennedy took the elevator up to the fourth floor. Traffic on Interstate 205 had been snarled up because of the weather, and as a result he was late. He’d telephoned his secretary to have Vasilanti’s meeting pushed back to nine, which had been approved, but she’d warned him that his phone was ringing off the hook. The usual spate of Monday morning problems. But there was one call from Washington that he would have to deal with personally. “I don’t recommend you use the car phone.”