Red traitor, p.19
Red Traitor, page 19
“Did they see us?”
“Don’t think so, sir. Seas are still pretty high.”
Savitsky leaned right and yanked the lever by his seat that controlled the main rudder toward him, putting the boat into a hard turn to port. He then cranked the three engine telegraph levers arranged above his head to dead slow. A moment later the telegraphs indicated with a ding that the engine room had acknowledged the order.
The control room crew froze in anxious silence, every man looking up to the sloping steel roof as they strained their ears to listen.
A faint sonar ping rang through the steel hull. Arkhipov turned urgently to Savitsky.
“The damn plane’s dropped a sonar buoy.”
Both captains knew that their best chance to escape the sonar tracking was to get into deep water, fast.
“Make our depth one twenty meters, conn,” Savitsky ordered. There was no sound in the control center except the low thrum of the electric engines and the slow sloshing of water in the ballast tanks.
A second ping, fainter than the first, rang through the boat.
The indicator of the shallow depth gauge fluttered to a stop on its maximum setting—sixty meters. The deep diving gauge crept on through eighty, then a hundred meters. The midshipman at the diving controls, sweating with concentration, pulled back the forward and aft diving fins while his colleague ducked back and forth along a bewildering array of taps to even out the water in the ballast tanks. The depth indicator settled neatly on 120.
Arkhipov waited, barely breathing, his ears straining. The sonar signal had gone.
2
Sargasso Sea
Thursday, 25 October 1962, 0649 EDT / 1349 Moscow Time
Captain Billings was just finishing breakfast in the USS Bache’s officers’ mess when his communications officer appeared in the doorway.
“Sir, recon planes have found a sub. Maybe two.”
Billings snatched the message from the lieutenant’s hand. An order from the admiral on the Randolph for the Bache and five other destroyers to make full speed to a position forty miles to the east.
“What have they got?”
“Sonar buoys picked up a contact, sir. Naval Air Station Patuxent River just analyzed the tapes from the reconnaissance birds. Looks like two Soviet subs. Course unknown, and no visual contact. We lost them after a few minutes.”
Billings cursed softly. Hurricane Ella had stirred great bodies of cold water up from the depths of the ocean. The area where that cold water met the warmer surface water was known in the trade as a thermocline. The differing density and salinity of the two bodies of water created an underwater barrier that caused sonar signals to bounce off it like light from a mirror. The Soviet subs had dived under the thermocline, becoming invisible to the US Navy’s sonar.
Still. Contact was better than no contact. And the forecast showed the weather settling. One day of calm and the seawater would mix, dissolving the invisibility cloak that masked the enemy.
“Very good. Acknowledge the message to the Randolph. Tell ’em we’ll be on station in two hours. And get Commander Kimble to meet me up on the bridge. Tell him we’re going hunting.”
3
Fort George G. Meade, Maryland
Thursday, 25 October 1962, 08:50 EDT / 17:50 Moscow Time
Jack Dunlop cut the wheel of his green ’59 Cadillac Coupe de Ville into a sharp right turn, making the powerful car sway on its suspension as it veered into the turnoff from Maryland Route 175. It was a glorious fall day, and the hemlock and chestnut oak woodlands that lined the freeway were a blaze of gold and red. He rolled to a halt on the rise that led to the security gates of Fort George G. Meade—a tollbooth-type building that spanned four lanes of traffic and was built to look like an old-time covered bridge, all shingle tiles and topped with a church-style spire. In front of him a huge line of cars, far more than usual, waited patiently to present their passes to the military police sentries who guarded the facility. Something was up.
Dunlop’s old Army buddies had teased him about the car he’d bought shortly after leaving the service the previous year. What’s a sergeant doing driving an officer’s hotrod?
“Get a job as a civilian contractor like me and you could buy one your own dumb selves,” he’d answered. “But you gotta grow a brain first.”
Dunlop vaguely recognized the black kid who scrutinized his civilian security pass. Looked a lot like one of the grunts he’d thrown in the brig a couple of years back when he’d busted some Saturday-night beer party. The private’s dirty look confirmed it.
“Y’all have a nice day now, boy,” Dunlop called, jamming his foot on the accelerator and leaving the sentry in a cloud of exhaust.
The headquarters of the United States National Security Agency looked like a ten-story, concrete air-conditioning unit. The only thing that distinguished the hulking block from its neighbors—all Defense Department bureaucracies—was a row of giant white golf balls lined up on its roof. Radio and radar receivers, the most sophisticated in the world. Someday soon, talk was, there’d be another gizmo up there talking directly to satellites in space.
Dunlop cruised around the facility’s gigantic parking lot looking for a space, cursing softly as he roved further and further away from the front entrance. The place was unusually full. Once he’d finally parked, he checked his tie and hair part in the rearview mirror, picked up his overcoat, and headed in to work.
Despite his smart tweed sport coat and neat buzz cut, Dunlop was only a chauffeur. True, the man he drove was the Agency’s chief of staff, Major-General Thomas M. Watlington. And he was pulling down three times his old Army sergeant’s salary. But basically Dunlop was a servant. And when he wasn’t driving the boss back and forth into Washington in his big black Buick limo, Dunlop’s job was as messenger boy to the boss. Actually, in practice, messenger boy to the boss’s secretary. Mrs. Vera Lovelace—pretty name, ugly woman. Mrs. Fuckface, Dunlop called her. But only behind her back.
One of Dunlop’s old Army mates had jokingly called him Stepin Fetchit a few months before, and the guys had all laughed. He’d wanted to deck the fella, but the guy was twice Dunlop’s size, so he just pulled his mouth into a toothy grin and pretended to take it as a joke. Dunlop did that a lot. Grin and bear it—as well as step and fetch on a daily basis. But every time old Fuckface told him off for dawdling in the cafeteria at lunch, or sent him scurrying around the building delivering one set of files or collecting another, Dunlop would remember his own, very private, secret. And that would really make him smile.
“Morning, Mrs. L.! Some fine fall weather we’re havin’.” Somehow Dunlop could never resist the temptation to thicken his native accent—pure Bogalusa, Louisiana, and y’at as gumbo—whenever he spoke to her.
Fuckface looked up, her mouth as usual pursed like a dog’s bottom. She hated being called Mrs. L. But something else was wrong. Her makeup was smudged, and she had dark rings of exhaustion under her eyes.
“You ever read the papers, Jack, listen to the radio news?”
“Not if I can help it, ma’am. I like to sleep good, nights.”
“Well, that would account for your good cheer.”
“Something I need to know about, Mrs. Lovelace?”
“Last night the President put the United States Strategic Air Command on DEFCON 2. You got any idea what that means, Jack?”
“Nothin’ good?”
“We’re gonna bomb Russia’s what it means.”
“Wow. But we gonna lick ’em, right? Had it comin’ ’n’ all.”
An intercom light flashed on the secretary’s telephone.
“You ain’t got no kids, Jack.”
Lovelace picked up the call, murmured an affirmative, and replaced the receiver.
“General Watlington’s due at the Pentagon at twelve.”
“Sure thing, ma’am.”
Dunlop glanced at her out-box, which was stacked with files that had just crossed the boss’s desk.
“Take those down to the typing pool for y’all? Heading that direction anyhow.”
Without waiting for an answer, he gathered the stack with his cheeriest down-home smile and headed out of the office. Halfway down the carpeted corridor, Dunlop ducked confidently into a windowless room that housed the department’s latest technical marvel—a miniaturized xerographic machine. The prototype Xerox 813 was impressively tiny, no bigger than a small washing machine. Dunlop waited as one of the cutest of the junior secretaries finished running off her copies and grinned shyly at her as she hurried out. She did not return his smile. Once she was gone, Dunlop began leafing through the stack of files he’d taken from General Watlington’s office. He gave a low whistle as he read. Nuclear-armed B-52 heavy bombers on continuous airborne alert—twenty-three of them ordered to orbit points within striking distance of the Soviet Union. B-47 medium bombers in the vicinity of Cuba on fifteen minutes’ standby, also loaded with nukes. A hundred and forty-five intercontinental ballistic missiles in silos all over the United States stood up to ready alert. Contact with a pair of Russian subs reported off the coast of Puerto Rico.
“Hot damn.”
Dunlop fed the most important-looking papers into the Xerox as fast as the machine would allow.
* * *
—
When he’d first started his spying gig, Dunlop had been nervous as all hell. The first few times he walked out of the office with a sheaf of stolen papers tucked inside his Army tunic, he’d expected alarm bells to ring and military policemen to come running from every side. But no alarm had ever rung, and the MPs had always nodded him through. Or not noticed him at all. Dunlop was that kind of guy. Skinny and buck-toothed, he looked like one of nature’s unimportant people. Sometimes General Watlington even called him Jim, not Jack. Asshole.
Dunlop soon realized that the best way to hide was in plain sight. Over the year he’d been working for Watlington, everyone had grown used to seeing him ferrying stacks of papers on his way to or from the boss’s office. Pretty soon the sight of Jack diligently making photocopies had grown familiar to passing clerks, too. Becoming a civilian contractor had definitely helped. People respected you more without bars on your collar or stripes on your sleeve—they had less to go on. That was why Dunlop always dressed so smart. In a suit, you could be anyone. Almost.
His photocopying finished, Dunlop quickly gathered all the original files into the right order and slipped his copies into a manila envelope that he put at the bottom of the pile. As he entered the typing pool, he checked the clock. Less than twenty minutes had passed since he’d picked up the documents from the boss’s out-box.
He slapped the files on the high desk of the typists’ head clerk, waved cheerily, and continued on his way with the brown envelope in his hand. This was obviously stuff that couldn’t wait.
The boss was due at the Pentagon at midday. Reckon forty-five minutes from Fort Meade to Arlington. Call it an hour, even with a police escort. The boss would likely be there until at least two p.m. That left plenty of time for a lunchtime drop.
Dunlop folded his manila envelope in half and slipped it into a wide inside pocket of his wool overcoat, which he draped over his arm. He took an elevator down to the basement garage. He had nearly an hour to put a shine on the Buick’s chrome work. And to make a short personal call from the phone in the mechanics’ station to a local Maryland number that was always answered by the same woman, night or day. And always on the third ring.
“Hey, honey! Wanna grab a sandwich in Arlington? Be there at lunchtime.”
4
Crystal City, Virginia
Thursday, 25 October 1962, 12:00 EDT / 19:00 Moscow Time
In truth, Dunlop never could work out exactly how the Russians had found him. There’d been some smart-ass old loudmouth in a dive bar in Millersville, sounding off about how the military was the last preserve of the asshole. Dunlop had still been in the Army back then, and was figuring to maybe punch the guy out, for the honor of the colors and all. But then the guy mentioned that he was a D-Day vet from the 101st Airborne. So they got to drinking instead, and what the old-timer said about the military-industrial complex and the oppression of the working class had made some sense. Turned out Dunlop had plenty of his own to say about the assholes who populated the officer corps—and a fair bit about how the NSA was nickel-and-diming regular soldiers like himself by getting them to do clerical work for a fraction of a real salary.
They’d made a vague, drunken arrangement to catch up again the following week. But when Dunlop showed up at the bar the second time, the veteran was with a friend, name of Mickey. Heavyset, street-fighter type with a broad Boston accent. Mickey had done most of the talking, mostly about how the government was out to screw the working stiff. About how he’d found a million ways to cheat the Man, back when Mickey had been in the Navy. Stealing gas. Selling mattresses and C rations and Lord knew what else off the back of the wagon. And know what really sold? Paper, man. Just pieces of paper. I know guys who’ll pay you ten bucks a sheet.
Two weeks later Dunlop had smuggled out the first sheaf of documents he’d grabbed randomly from his superior officer’s desk. A smartly dressed older gent, trying hard to cover up a foreign accent, met Dunlop in the parking lot of the Millersville bar and gave him a hundred and twenty bucks in exchange for the documents. Mickey had been right. Ten bucks a sheet.
So that’s how it had begun. Two years in, and Dunlop reckoned he’d made upward of forty grand—all in cash. Just who it was who was paying him, Dunlop didn’t rightly know. Or care, really. But neither was he a complete fool. Of course it had to be the Russkies. And of course he was betraying his country. But politics bored Dunlop. The part of the gig he really enjoyed—in addition to the cash, of course—was the deep, warm glow he felt every time he drove out of Fort George G. Meade with a cache of documents in his pocket. The thrill of sticking it to every officer/manager/government jerk who’d ever humiliated him.
The Electric Diner stood at the end of a nondescript strip mall on the outskirts of Crystal City, just off Interstate 1. It was a five-minute drive from the Pentagon. Dunlop parked the showy Buick in front of a gas station next door and ducked into the mini-mart to pick up gum, cigarettes, and a newspaper. He walked to the diner and ordered lunch at the counter. Tuna melt and coffee was the least crappy menu item, as Dunlop had established after a dozen or so drop-offs. After he’d bolted his sandwich and impatiently swigged the dregs of his coffee, a nondescript, balding man in a bad suit appeared as usual at his elbow. Dunlop nodded silently at the waitress, pushed a couple of dollars across the counter, stood, and chivalrously yielded his stool to the newcomer.
“This your paper, buddy?” That’s all the guy would ever say.
“Finished with it. Help yesself.”
The balding man took his seat without giving Dunlop a second glance, sweeping the paper with its sheaf of documents into his raincoat pocket. When Dunlop got back to the Buick, he found the usual slim envelope containing six fifty-dollar bills slipped through the driver’s-side window that he’d left open a crack.
Dunlop waited in silence for a couple of minutes before reluctantly gunning the Buick’s huge engine into life to return and wait for Watlington. If there was really going to be a war, the Pentagon was about the last place on God’s green earth that Jack wanted to be.
5
Soviet Embassy, Washington, DC
Friday, 26 October 1962, 15:15 EDT / 22:15 Moscow Time
Alexander Semyonovich Feklisov stood by the attic windows of the KGB rezidentura’s office gazing past the roof of the YMCA of Metropolitan Washington to the spires of St. Matthew’s Cathedral beyond. The last few days had been the most stressful of Feklisov’s life—but today the KGB’s Washington bureau chief felt himself physically trembling with the strain. He put down his coffee cup and forced himself to breathe slowly.
Feklisov had been bracing himself for months, of course, for the moment when the Americans found out about the missile shipments. Thank God his new boss on station, Ambassador Anatoliy Dobrynin, was smarter than the knuckleheads in the Kremlin. He’d agreed with Feklisov from the start that the Cuban missile project was madness. But Khrushchev had evidently decided that Kennedy was a weak pushover after their meeting in Vienna the previous summer. The problem was that Khrushchev didn’t know America—or Americans. But Feklisov knew. He’s been stationed here, on and off, since 1941. He knew perfectly well just how local their horizons were. Kennedy wouldn’t start a world war over distant Berlin. But he sure as hell would over Cuba, ninety miles from his own coast.
Feklisov had always known that the shitstorm that would inevitably ensue over Cuba would be far worse than the Kremlin had bargained for. But now the crisis was upon them, and it was escalating with an unstoppable force and speed that he never imagined possible.
DEFCON 2.
He could hardly believe it. Since Kennedy’s order had gone out at ten p.m. two days before, the world was officially within fifteen minutes of all-out nuclear war.
Over the preceding few days Feklisov had allowed himself to believe that the two sides were on the verge of thrashing out a face-saving compromise. His boss Dobrynin had been talking privately to Kennedy’s brother Bobby throughout the crisis, feeling their way toward a diplomatic solution. And the Ambassador had also been talking to Khrushchev, practically begging the Comrade General Secretary to believe that Kennedy was serious about war.
And now, despite all that frantic backstage diplomacy, a sudden escalation. DEFCON 2 made no sense. The Kennedy brothers knew that Khrushchev was ready to back down. So was this a bluff to pile on the pressure? Or, God forbid, a sign that the American military was taking matters into their own hands?
