lock-up mode. So, a missile was probably not in the air, and the sky was clear enough that he’d probably see the smoke trail that such missiles always left, and today—no, no smoke coming up from the ground. For defensive systems, he had only a primitive chaff dispenser and prayer. Not even a white-noise jammer, the major groused. But there was no sense in worrying. He was ten kilometers inside his own country’s airspace, and whatever SAM systems the Chinese possessed were probably well inside their own borders. It would be a stretch for them to reach him, and he could always turn north and run while punching loose a few kilos of shredded aluminum foil to give the inbound missile something else to chase. As it played out, the mission involved four complete sweeps of the border region, and that required ninety otherwise boring minutes before he reprogrammed the M-5 back to the old fighter base outside Taza.
The ground crew supporting the mission had also been deployed from the Moscow area. As soon as the M-5 rolled to a stop, the film cassettes were unloaded and driven to the portable film lab for development, then forwarded, still wet, to the interpreters. They saw few tanks, but lots of tracks in the ground, and that was all they needed to see.
CHAPTER 49
Disarming
I know, Oleg. I understand that we developed the intelligence in Washington and forwarded it to your people immediately,” Reilly said to his friend.
“You must be proud of that,” Provalov observed.
“Wasn’t the Bureau that did it,” Reilly responded. The Russians would be touchy about having Americans provide them with such sensitive information. Maybe Americans would have reacted the same way. “Anyway, what are you going to do about it?”
“We’re trying to locate his electronic correspondents. We have their addresses, and they are all on Russian-owned ISPs. FSS probably has them all identified by now.”
“Arrest them when?”
“When they meet Suvorov. We have enough to make the arrests now.”
Reilly wasn’t sure about that. The people Suvorov wanted to meet could always say that they came to see him by invitation without having a clue as to the purpose of the meeting, and a day-old member of the bar could easily enough sell the “reasonable doubt” associated with that to a jury. Better to wait until they all did something incriminating, and then squeeze one of them real hard to turn state’s evidence on the rest. But the rules and the juries were different here.
Anatoliy, what are you thinking about?“ Golovko asked. ”Comrade Chairman, I am thinking that Moscow has suddenly become dangerous,” Major Shelepin replied. ”The idea of former Spetsnaz men conspiring to commit treason on this scale sickens me. Not just the threat, but also the infamy of it. These men were my comrades in the army, trained as I was to be guardians of the State.” The handsome young officer shook his head.
“Well, when this place was the KGB, it happened to us more than once. It is unpleasant, yes, but it is reality. People are corruptible. It is human nature,” Golovko said soothingly. Besides, the threat isn’t against me now, he didn’t add. An unworthy thought, perhaps, but that also was human nature. “What is President Grushavoy’s detail doing now?”
“Sweating, I should imagine. Who can say that this is the only threat? What if this Kong bastard has more than one such agent in Moscow? We should pick him up, too.”
“So we shall, when the time comes. He’s been observed to do only one dead-drop over the past week, and we control that one—yes, yes, I know,” Sergey added, when he saw the beginnings of Anatoliy’s objections. “He isn’t the only MSS operative in Moscow, but he’s probably the only one on this case. Security considerations are universal. They must worry that one of their officers might be in our employ, after all. There are many wheels in such an operation, and they don’t all turn in the same direction, my young friend. You know what I miss?”
“I should imagine it is having the second chief directorate under the same roof. That way the operation would be run cooperatively.”
Golovko smiled. “Correct, Anatoliy Ivan’ch. For now, we can only do our job and wait for others to do theirs. And, yes, waiting is never an entertaining way to spend one’s time.” With that observation, both men resumed staring at the desk phones, waiting for them to ring.
The only reason that surveillance hadn’t been tightened any more was that there