III

Sunday Night

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) … The White House, in a brief announcement today, indicated that directly after his Moscow trip President Forsythe would vacation for five days at his Colorado Springs home.

Chief White House physician, Dr. William N. Morris, said the president was in generally good health for a man of his age, but did need the rest.

The vacation will be the first for the president since he took office 15 months ago.

Wallace Mahoney entered the second floor staff dining room, diplomat territory, and hesitated a moment just inside the doorway while he searched for a specific face.

The dining room, located in the front of the embassy building, served mostly the diplomatic corps below the rank of assistant to the chargé d’affaires. The ambassador and his high-level staff ate in a small, pleasant room near the ambassador’s office, and the CIA personnel, of which there were eleven including Mahoney, either ate out, grabbed a sandwich in their offices, or mingled in one or the other of the dining rooms.

Officially the Central Intelligence Agency did not work out of the American embassy, and therefore had no staff here. Unofficially everyone down to the lowliest typist in the steno pool knew that was a line of crap. But no one ever played the guessing game as to who was CIA and who was not. That was a sure method of guaranteeing a early rotation home with a bad service report. Moscow was grim enough without having to return home from a three-year assignment with absolutely no future.

A few people in the fairly crowded dining room noticed Mahoney standing by the door and they waved to him, but he merely returned the greetings as he continued to search for the specific face.

The regular embassy staffers had been told they had to work overtime, beginning this morning, to make ready for the president’s visit. Part truth, part lie. It was true the preparations for a presidential visit fell heavily to the American embassy, but that could have been started sometime tomorrow or even Tuesday. The staff had been called in this morning to act as a cover for the sudden CIA activities.

Mahoney finally spotted the man he was looking for, seated alone at a table across the room. He ambled down the cafeteria line, poured himself a cup of coffee at the urn, paid for it, and then went across to the window table.

Dr. Clifford White, who was a Harvard professor of economics, looked up and peered at Mahoney through thick spectacles, a quizzical expression on his face.

“I see they even called you in today, Dr. White,” Mahoney began pleasantly.

White, who was not yet thirty-five had the slightly bemused, open-mouthed look about him that marks most long-term Ivory Tower residents, and he squinted at Mahoney, obviously with no recognition on his face. “Yes,” he said, his voice soft, almost effeminate. “Most unusual, Mr … ah…”

“Mahoney. Wallace Mahoney. I’m with the trade mission. May I join you?”

White continued to squint up at Mahoney for a moment, but then as if remembering his manners, indicated a chair. “Of course, it’s my pleasure, Mr. Mahoney.”

Mahoney sunk gratefully into the chair across the small table from the younger man. It was just past seven in the evening, and already the day seemed as if it had gone on for a couple of weeks, with every indication it would continue for a month or more.

Dr. White was ostensibly on a one-year study grant from Harvard to observe the Soviet economy at close hand. His real assignment, although neither he nor Harvard knew it, was to provide data for the likes of Mahoney. Data that would be funneled through CIA channels for assessment purposes. Strings had been pulled in the State Department, the bug was put in the Harvard Economics Department ear, and a few months later Dr. White was on his way.

So far he had provided only routine data, nothing more or less than had been expected. Once each week, White prepared a lengthy report on Soviet economic conditions that was to be sent back to Harvard. Of course, the report was included with the diplomatic pouch mailings. And of course it went via Mahoney’s office where copies were made.

“Should I know you, Mr. Mahoney?” Dr. White asked.

Mahoney smiled pleasantly as he sipped his coffee. “We’ve bumped into each other briefly in the corridors, but I have not as yet had the pleasure of working with you. I do know something about you, however, or rather about your work.”

“How interesting,” White said, not returning the smile.

“Your monograph on Soviet consumer economics published last year I found highly interesting,” Mahoney said, which was in part truth. The monograph, which Mahoney had read—but not until last month—was one of the reasons White had been selected for this assignment. When it came to Soviet economics, the man knew what he was talking about.

“And now you would like to work with me?”

“Not exactly,” Mahoney said. “But I do need your help, if at all possible.”

Dr. White’s eyebrows arched, the action somehow irritating to Mahoney. “I’m afraid I’m quite too busy these days. I only have a few months left on my study grant and the work has been piling up.”

“This would not take much of your time, Dr. White. A single morning. Perhaps tomorrow morning.”

“Out of the question…” the younger man started to protest, but suddenly the expression on his face changed. His eyes narrowed and his lips puckered slightly, as if he had suddenly recalled something distasteful. “I can’t do a thing for you,” he said and started to rise.

Mahoney forced his expression and tone of voice to remain conversational as he smiled up at the man. “I suggest you sit down and hear what I have to say, Dr. White. I’m sure you will find it most interesting.”

“Not on your life,” White said shrilly, his hands on his hips.

The effeminate gesture increased Mahoney’s irritation, and he could almost feel his blood pressure rising, yet he forced his voice to remain calm. “Sit down, Dr. White, or I will sit you down.”

A few others in the dining room were looking their way, and White glanced across the room, and then back down at Mahoney, his face indecisive. Mahoney started to rise and White quickly sat down.

“I know you, Mahoney,” the man said, and Mahoney could see a trace of fear in his eyes. He smiled.

“From where?”

“Paul told me. Paul Bennet—he was at my home a few nights ago for dinner. He mentioned your name. You work for Farley Carlisle. You’re a CIA man.”

“And so are you,” Mahoney said, regretting his lack of control.

The shock on the economics professor’s face was instant and genuine. It was as if someone had told the leader of the Ku Klux Klan he was black. White began to sputter his protests, but Mahoney held him off.

“By tomorrow noon at the latest I’ll need all the current data that you will be using for your next weekly report. I’ll also need you to extrapolate that data into a series of general parameters that might indicate current Soviet government expenditures.”

Dr. White’s face had turned a pasty color. “You’ve been into my weekly reports,” he said. “You’ve opened my mail.” Mahoney nodded. “That is correct. And until this point you’ve only gathered data. You’ve made no conclusions. We need your expert opinions now. Tomorrow at the latest.”

“Impossible without further study.”

“Nor will you have any further study unless you cooperate with me.”

White jumped to his feet again, only this time he did not appear indecisive. He was mad. “You can’t intimidate me. I know my rights. I’m a civilian. The ambassador will hear about this.”

A number of people in the dining room were again looking their way, but Mahoney didn’t give a damn any longer. Dr. White would have to be recruited. “The ambassador is not here today.”

“What?” White said loudly.

Mahoney stared up at him. “I said the ambassador isn’t here today. You’ll have to see the chargé d’affaires—Stewart Anderson. He’s upstairs in his office at the moment.”

White looked imperiously down at Mahoney, flipped his right shoulder and laughed. “I’ll do just that. This instant,” he said, and he turned and stalked out of the room.

Carlisle would give him some static about his manhandling White, thus blowing the man’s self-image about his position, and thus possibly his usefulness, but it could not be helped. White would not have cooperated otherwise, and conclusions were what they needed.

Besides, Mahoney thought, he had a lever now to use against Carlisle. Bennet, who was Carlisle’s pet, had himself compromised the situation by shooting off his big mouth. It was Bennet who had led White astray, had told White that Mahoney was CIA and not merely a trade mission staffer.

Carlisle had been in and out of Mahoney’s office all afternoon, along with a string of others, all the way from Munson with his as yet negative communications reports, to Switt, Bennet and even Colonel McCann whom Mahoney personally felt sorry for. The man had absolutely no business being in Moscow, and whoever in the Pentagon had handed him this assignment was probably either very stupid, or had a grudge against the man. And Carlisle’s having included him in this morning’s briefing was asinine.

The activities of this long day had tired Mahoney, and he sat back in his chair and went through the routine of lighting himself a cigar. It would take Dr. White about three minutes to get upstairs to Anderson’s office and begin laying out his problem. Another couple of minutes would be spent hashing it out. Then Anderson would call Carlisle into his office.

Carlisle would be mad at first, but then seeing that there was nothing he could do about it, he would spend at least ten or fifteen minutes explaining the facts of life to the Harvard professor.

Mahoney could almost envision the scene. When Carlisle had finally run out of arguments to throw at White, arguments that would have proved totally ineffective, he would turn to Anderson, and in his flat, emotionless voice make a statement to the effect: “This man will be on a plane for the States within twenty-four hours. I want him quarantined in the embassy until then. We’ll send someone around to his apartment to pick up his personal belongings.”

At that point Dr. White would, of course, capitulate. After all, it was for his own country. And he was accomplishing tons of work while here. It would be a shame to let it all go down the drain.

And Mahoney. A bit gruff perhaps. Maybe even a bastard. But hell, when it came right down to the last analysis, the man was on our side.

“It wouldn’t be as if I were a traitor.”

Mahoney smiled wryly as his gaze wandered around the room at the others having their dinners. Why were any of them here in the first place? A visit to Moscow was perhaps understandable. To see the museums, to absorb the history that stretched back hundreds of years. But who would want to live and work here? The city was too grim, its people too preoccupied with survival.

As an intelligence officer, that was a stupid question. Moscow was rich with data. Clandestine information seemed to hang thick in the air. And it put everyone on edge.

Mahoney turned that thought over in his mind. Perhaps he was getting too old for this business. Perhaps he was done with it.

He had often thought about buying a small place in northern Minnesota, on a lake. A small boat with a trolling motor. Fishing in the morning when the wind was calm and the lake’s surface was so absolutely smooth it looked like a fairy tale mirror, reflecting the pale blue sky, the yellow sun, and the ragged green borders around the shoreline caused by the reflection of the pine forests.

Once when he was a child he had spent the summer at Shultz Lake in northern Minnesota with his uncle Fred. Mahoney had only been eight or nine, and his Uncle had been in his early seventies. The cabin had been built thirty years earlier by his uncle before the man had his first bouts with the cancer that eventually would take his voice, then his life.

One morning they had risen early for a day of fishing. It was early summer, and not very many people had come up to the lake yet.

About an hour into the morning a huge northern hit Uncle Fred’s line, and Mahoney could still vividly see the pole bent almost double, an expression of absolute joy and contentment on the old man’s face as he huffed and puffed. And then the line broke.

His uncle Fred had slowly reeled in the line and then tested it with his hands. The string was rotted. It had probably been laying around in a fishing reel for ten years or more. And even as a young man Mahoney could see that his uncle Fred knew the rotted fishing line was a sort of symbol that his life was almost over with.

In the early days, when the man had come every summer to the cabin, he had kept up with such things as making sure there was fresh fishing line. But now such attention to details had escaped him. And Uncle Fred was like the rotted fishing line that had come to the end of its usefulness, could only lie around in the sun with no real purpose.

Mahoney had cried for the old man that morning. And by the end of that summer his uncle Fred had died.

Mahoney only rarely thought about his own mortality, but he turned it over in his mind now. When he died it damned well was not going to be as an old man trying to work some operation. Rather it would be on some northern Minnesota lake where he was told that the northerns were still hitting.

He shook his head, flicked the ash from his cigar, got up and headed toward his office. Dr. White would be ready to go to work in a few more minutes, and although an economic assessment of current Soviet government operations was a little thin as far as this operation was concerned, Mahoney was not worried. He had always worked thin.

What he looked for in such overall assessments were incongruities.

“Amass a body of facts, of data, and certain elements will always stand out as different from the others. Inconsistent. Incongruous. Apples, oranges, peaches, hammers, grapes, bananas.

“Look to the incongruities. When several of them are gathered, look to that data pool for conclusions.”

*   *   *

It was as if a cold wind were blowing through his soul, and Zamyatin wanted to believe the feeling stemmed from the fact it was late, he had worked all day, and he was tired. But that simply was not true. He had never been less tired, and more awake than at this moment. The chill that burned deep inside of him came from something else. Fear perhaps?

By 8:30 all six of his department chiefs had crammed into his tiny office. By 9:00 P.M., he had briefed them all, had distributed copies of Professor Doctor Sakharov’s jacket, the composite drawings of the two men who had snatched him, and the statements from the Moscow State University gate guard and physics wing guards.

The only thing he had left out of his briefing was his speculation about the significance of the due date: 1100 hours Thursday. If it was idle speculation, better to keep it to himself. If it had a basis in fact, it would come out. And at this moment Zamyatin was beginning to believe it already had come out.

Zamyatin stared across his desk at Major Boris Balachov, chief of Department One of Political Security Service. The man in charge of the department that watched over the American embassy.

Balachov was a young man, in his early thirties, who lived and worked under the name Leonard Skyles. His hair was cut in a Western style, his clothes were American imports, he smoked Marlboros, and his English was flawless New York, not the Oxford English that so many non-Americans spoke.

During the briefing in which Zamyatin had instructed his department chiefs to begin assembling all current embassy data, all the way from how much electricity and water each embassy was consuming, how often service employees did their jobs, to the latest microwave scans and telephone tap outputs, Balachov had made a simple statement that had completely stunned Zamyatin.

“They’ve been busy over the past twenty-four hours on Tchaikovsky Street.”

Zamyatin had turned toward his First Department chief who was sitting back nonchalantly, but the man did not offer to amplify on his statement, and Zamyatin had cut his briefing short.

“Time and motion for outputs,” he summarized his request. “If we know what they’ve been consuming, the hours they are spending, the personnel showing up, it might give us a clue not only to their activities, but the importance they are placing on those activities.”

No one had offered anything further, and Zamyatin had dismissed them. As the others rose to leave, Zamyatin asked Major Balachov to remain, and now alone, Zamyatin was almost afraid to ask the man for more information.

He didn’t have to. Balachov started without prompting.

“Barynin’s due date is curious,” he began. Even his Russian was somewhat flat, although he had never been out of the Soviet Union.

Zamyatin perched on the edge of his chair, barely daring to breathe. “You find it so, Major?”

Balachov took his pack of Marlboros out and offered one, but Zamyatin shook his head. Balachov smiled as he lit himself a cigarette and returned the package to his breast pocket. He took a deep drag, exhaling slowly.

“Sakharov and a laser device have been lifted from Moscow State by someone who our department must assume is external to the KGB. Someone from one of the embassies in town. But it must have been someone who knew the workings of our Fifth Chief Directorate well enough to fool the university guards. Not a big task in itself, but large enough so that I would rule out almost everyone we are charged with watching.”

Zamyatin continued to hold his silence as he listened to the man.

“Coincident with that operation, the American embassy suddenly comes alive. Top level on down. Everyone is there. Everyone. Let us ask ourselves why.”

“Why?” Zamyatin heard himself asking, his throat dry.

Balachov smiled. “The American president is coming on Thursday. The Americans are making ready for his visit.”

Zamyatin shook his head. “They would not begin such preparations so soon. Not until tomorrow, perhaps Tuesday.”

“Perhaps they are planning some in-house function. Such as a special briefing for the president, so they need time to make reports and summaries.”

Again Zamyatin shook his head. “The diplomatic corps might sweat a few hours extra for that. But you said everyone had shown up.”

“So I did,” Balachov said, continuing to play the game of devil’s advocate. “Perhaps they are preparing for some preliminary meeting with Comrade Brezhnev before their president arrives?”

“No,” Zamyatin said softly. “Ambassador Leland Smith is out of the country. They would not make such a move without him.”

“He is returning tomorrow?”

“No. Not until Thursday.”

Balachov puffed on his cigarette for several long moments in silence before he finally nodded, almost sleepily. “No indeed,” he said, and he stared across the desk at Zamyatin. “Nor would such diplomatic preparations require the presence of Farley Carlisle.”

“Carlisle came in?” Zamyatin asked.

“The first. As far as we can determine, the call-up emanated from him.”

Carlisle was well known in the KGB for his work in Portugal. The Komitet had managed over an eight-year period to place a dozen men at high levels of the government in Lisbon. In one year’s time Carlisle had converted three government officials to informant status. One of them was a Komitet man, who was later found dead in his apartment.

It had been a brilliant operation on the American CIA man’s part, and it had won the grudging admiration of field men everywhere.

The only reason Carlisle had been allowed to enter the Soviet Union under the guise of an assistant to the ambassador was that it was thought at the Kremlin that it was better to have the man in full view at all times. At least this way he would not come up with any further surprises.

Carlisle was a cold, dispassionate man. One with no loose ends to be compromised. Despite the fact the Lisbon center had tumbled to Carlisle’s activities almost from the beginning, it had taken their people more than a year to get rid of him. He had no wife, no children, no vices, no secrets that could be used as a lever on him. He was clean. Almost inhumanly so.

The only reason Zamyatin, and therefore his First Department Chief, Balachov, knew anything about the man and about his activities in Lisbon was because he was under their personal supervision. They were charged with making sure he kept in one place, both hands on the table, so to speak. So Zamyatin and Balachov had been briefed about the man and his background two years ago when he had come to Moscow.

Since that time they had watched him with very special care.

“It would not be beyond Carlisle to engineer such a plot,” Balachov was saying, and Zamyatin had to force himself away from his black thoughts.

“What?” he said.

“It’s an imaginative plan. Worthy of Carlisle. Kidnap a Russian scientist and a Russian weapon. Assassinate the president in the presence of a planeload of American newsmen.”

“Insanity,” Zamyatin breathed.

“On the contrary. President Forsythe is not well liked. The Middle East situation has been effectively blamed on his meddling and interference, despite his capable work with Sadat and Begin. When that situation erupts he might be impeached. No, I think Carlisle’s plan has merit. The American Joint Chiefs, the president’s Cabinet, and even the National Security Council would not shed a tear if their beloved president were dead. On Moscow soil. Killed by Russians.”

“Monstrous.”

“No more so than Kennedy’s assassination,” Balachov said, sitting forward. “The American public still speculates. Hoover and the FBI? The CIA somehow connected with the Mafia? Perhaps Fidel Castro? And what was done in that situation? Do you forget the hapless Lee Harvey Oswald? The dupe who married a Soviet girl? Who was known to have contacted our embassy in Mexico City? Do you forget those machinations, my dear Comrade Zamyatin?”

As Balachov spoke his voice rose louder and louder, and his eyes glittered like a hunter closing in for the kill. Like Carlisle, Balachov was clean. No wife. No family. Mother and father both dead. No vices or hangups. In fact, almost the perfect copy of Carlisle. Inhuman, but very, very good.

“This cannot be hung on Carlisle alone. There must have been others.” Zamyatin said.

“Indeed,” Balachov said triumphantly. “Many others. In Washington at high levels, I am sure, but more importantly to us, here in Moscow.” He flipped open the briefing file and pulled out the composite drawings of the two men who had grabbed Sakharov.

“These are Russians. No mistaking it. Carlisle was given the go-ahead for this operation as long as a year ago, when the Middle East situation began to go all to hell for the Americans. They don’t want another Vietnam. It was the reason Carlisle was sent here to Moscow in the first place. I’m certain of it.

“The Americans knew we had tumbled to his Lisbon operation, and yet they sent him here to Moscow. Curious. But in addition to Carlisle there must be Russians. Dissidents.

“Carlisle is running agents here and that will be my department’s first step. We will cull through all contact sheets over the past year to watch for the repeaters. Those we will investigate fully.”

“And then?”

“The information will be presented to General Barynin for his decision. That is policy. Not my field.”

“How about within the embassy itself?” Zamyatin asked after a thoughtful silence. “Who have we got current?”

“An assistant cook in the staff dining room. He is from Tennessee. Our foreign operations got to him two years ago. His assignment to Moscow was a stroke of pure luck.”

“No one else near to conversion?”

For the first time this evening Balachov seemed somewhat uncomfortable. “I’m afraid not, Comrade Zamyatin. Some progress is being made with a junior cipher clerk, but we are a long way away. I would hate to rush him for chance of ruining a potentially valuable convert.”

Zamyatin was a loyal man. Home, government, mission. His home was his three children. His government, the State. And his mission, to protect his children and the State from harm.

He was at this moment a frightened man, however. Frightened of the implications of what he and Major Balachov had been discussing. It was a single man’s assassination that had begun World War I. And it was the rise to power of a solitary figure that had brought about World War II. What would the assassination of an American president on Soviet soil do to the world situation? World War III, from which there would be no survival?

Perhaps the Fifth Chief Directorate had worked some kind of a plot, and indeed had kidnapped Sakharov and the laser. Perhaps Russian dissidents had for some reason kidnapped the scientist, to somehow strike back at the government they were so convinced was oppressive.

Perhaps any one of a dozen reasons could be found to explain Sakharov’s disappearance. None of those speculations, however, were any of Zamyatin’s concern. His mission was to first assume that someone within his area of expertise had done the kidnaping, and then try to prove it.

And at this moment, as distasteful, as deeply frightening as the possibility seemed, Zamyatin was being forced to assume that the Americans were behind Sakharov’s disappearance, and that it somehow tied in with the American president’s scheduled visit to Moscow on Thursday.

“What is your man in the embassy’s code and schedule?” Zamyatin asked finally.

“The cook is Zeta-one, and he works six days a week, from ten in the morning until eight at night.”

Zamyatin nodded. “I want his reports after each shift, the first report to include a summary of his conversion and information he has supplied from day one.”

“Yessir,” Balachov said, rising.

Zamyatin did not bother to get up. “I want your personal reports and assessments in my office every six hours, until this operation is completed.”

“Yessir,” Balachov said, and he waited for further orders, but when Zamyatin remained silent for several long moments, he gathered up his briefing files and his American raincoat and made to leave.

“Major Balachov,” Zamyatin said softly, evenly. The First Department chief turned back slowly.

“Yes?”

“At this point our conversation has been one merely of speculation. It would not do for me to hear such rumors floating on the breeze. Do I make myself clear?”

Zamyatin was a mild-mannered man. Everyone who had contact with him knew that. But what only a few people knew, and Major Balachov was one of them, having seen Zamyatin’s personnel dossier, was that at one time he had been, in Komitet jargon, a “hard man,” a very hard man indeed.

“Yessir,” Balachov said, subdued, and he meant it.

When Balachov was gone, Zamyatin stared at the closed door for a long time, lost in thought. The First Department Chief had confirmed his fears. At this point it seemed very likely that the Americans somehow were behind the disappearance of Sakharov and the laser.

But why? Was it really a plot to assassinate the president? Would they go that far again?

Zamyatin finally looked down at his desk and pulled a thick file folder toward him, then flipped it open to the first pages, which consisted of a series of photographs.

The first was of Wallace Mahoney, with the caption: “CIA senior analyst. U.S. Embassy Moscow. Trade Mission Office.”

There were other pictures in the file as well. Pictures of Mahoney’s wife Marge, and their two children, John and Michael.

John was a chemical engineer now in Los Angeles. Wife and three children. Michael was a scientist with the Forest Products Laboratory in Missoula, Montana. Unmarried.

Zamyatin flipped through the photographs and then began to ready Mahoney’s dossier as his mind wandered backward in time. It had been more than thirty years since he had last seen Mahoney. But during that time he had managed to keep abreast of the man’s career within the CIA.

With Mahoney, Zamyatin thought, there was perhaps a key to their problems.

Early Monday Morning

The larger of the three men sat in the driver’s seat of the black Volvo station wagon. One of the others sat in the passenger seat while the third was in the back. All of them were nervous.

The rain that had fallen all across west central Russia had continued without letup through the weekend, making the dirt roads outside the city muddy quagmires, and the open fields a vast swamp.

Spring. Rain from the gods and mud from the devil. It was the Muscovites’ plight.

The windshield wipers flapped back and forth. The Volvo’s engine was running, but its lights were off. To the left off the road about three-quarters of a mile through a thin birch forest, and a final three hundred yards across an open field, was the west wall of Lubyanka Prison II. Lockup for 731 men and women who had all been found guilty of “parasitism.”

It was a vicious, circular treadmill for Soviet writers and artists who did not play the game by the rules.

One got on the treadmill by openly speaking, writing, or painting contrary to the carefully laid rules of the Artists Union. Criticize the State. Doubt a Party leader. Disbelieve a five year outlook. Publish in the West without the State censor’s stamp of approval.

The treadmill turned.

The next position was the total denial of all publication or recreation rights. One could continue to write or paint, but no longer was a platform available from which to reach the people. No longer was income available from one’s art.

The treadmill turned.

The next position, in reality, only affected those without money. And what writer or artist, except for a very few, had any money? If one had no means of income, no method of support, then the State would have to step in. Socialism. The State took care of its own. No one starved. No one went without shelter.

The treadmill turned.

If self-support was impossible so that the State had to step in, then by definition one was a “parasite” who lived off the honest efforts of the people, sucking the lifeblood from the veins of the working class. Illegal.

The treadmill turned.

A speedy trial before three impartial judges in an out-of-the-way suburb. “This court finds you guilty—insert name—of parasitism, and sentences you to five years at hard labor at—insert prison name.”

The three men in the shabby car were all parasites, but that was not what was making them nervous this morning. They were frightened at the turn of events during the past months that seemed to be forcing them to make decisions they had never thought possible.

They were creators. Men of imagination. Men of the arts. Not violent creatures. The ends did not justify the means.

“And yet,” someone had asked at the last meeting, “how else can there be even a shred of hope for us?”

The largest of the three men, a giant of a man physically as well as mentally, looked at the luminous face of his watch. “It is time, my friends,” he said, careful to keep his voice soft although there was no one near to overhear him.

He shut the engine off, and the three of them got out of the car, standing their dark jacket collars up around their necks against the cold, windblown rain.

The other two men each carried a large ball of thick twine that they showed the larger man, and then they all held their breaths, waiting, listening for some sound from the prison, straining their eyes against the impenetrable darkness to catch at least a hint of the spotlights mounted on the prison guardtowers at each corner of the block-long wall.

But they could see or hear nothing other than the wind and rain sighing through the birch forest just off the road, and their own heartbeats.

The large man finally stepped down off the road into mud above his ankles, and the three of them worked their way very slowly, very carefully, and very silently toward the prison wall. To be caught here would mean more than a charge of parasitism with its attendent sentence of three to five years at hard labor. To be caught here like this meant treason: the penalty, death.

It took them fully three-quarters of an hour to make their way to the edge of the birch forest, and one of them involuntarily sucked in his breath as the faint trace of light flashed overhead from the spotlight on one of the guardtowers.

They all ducked down and at that moment were very close to giving up the entire insane plan, hurrying back to the car and going home.

Life is life. Let what will be, be. Mother Russia will endure.

But the large man’s presence denied that escape for them. They would continue by dint of his will, his spirit.

They crawled out into the open field, the thick mud clinging to their clothing, weighing them down and making them incredibly cold. Nevertheless, in twenty minutes they had covered more than half the distance between the shelter of the forest and the west wall rising gray and ominous out of the night.

The two smaller men each handed the large man one end of their twine rolls, and then headed in opposite directions parallel to the wall, leaving the large man where he was.

One man was to be stationed opposite each corner of the west wall, connected to the large man in the middle by the twine.

When a guard came around a corner, the man was to tug once on the twine, signalling.

They had learned that there were two guards on this wall, who met at irregular intervals and places. Sooner or later one of them would be alone, opposite the large man’s position.

Fifteen minutes after they had separated, the large man felt a single sharp tug to his right, and he tensed. A few moments later the twine leading into the darkness to his left pulled in his hand, and he settled back down from his half crouch.

He saw the guard to the left first, walking slowly, passing him without looking around, and finally disappearing in the darkness.

A few moments later the guard from the right appeared, passed the large man who crouched about twenty yards away, and then he, too, was lost in the night.

The large man moved a bit closer to the wall, and waited on his knees. The next time the two guards met, it would not be at this spot.

For twenty minutes the large man was alone with his thoughts. Alone. Cold. And somewhat frightened, he had to admit to himself. Frightened not only by what he was about to attempt to do, but by the consequences of it for his own soul, for his own personality. If one killed, for no matter what reason, was not one a killer? If you stole a loaf of bread to feed your family, weren’t you nevertheless a thief?

There was a sharp tug on the twine in his left hand, and the big man tensed, waiting for a tug from the right. The seconds seemed to drag, but the twine in his right hand remained slack.

Finally he tugged sharply twice with both hands, the signal that it would happen now, and then crouched, his heart nearly hammering out of his chest.

The guard appeared slowly out of the rain, almost as if he were an apparition, and the large man crouched very low into the mud. In slow motion the guard came along the wall, closer and closer, the water dripping off his helmet making his raincoat shine. He did not look like a machine. He looked very human.

Then he was moving past where the large man crouched. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. The large man eased himself to his feet, took a half-dozen careful steps behind the guard and then sprang with all of his considerable might toward the back of the figure.

At the moment of impact, the large man was surprised at how small the guard seemed to be. His burly arm curled around the guard’s head, then he dropped backward and yanked with all of his might to the left. The guard stiffened, there was a sickening snap as his neck broke, and he released his last breath with a muffled sob.

The large man was on his feet in an instant, straining his senses for the other guard, or for an alarm. But all was silence except for the rain and the wind in the forest across the field.

He picked the guard up and carried him like a rag doll under one arm across the field in a loping, graceless run, toward the safety of the birch forest.

At best they would only have about ten or fifteen minutes before the second guard became curious about his partner’s whereabouts. Perhaps another ten minutes of indecision before the alarm was sounded. And maybe another ten minutes before the road would be searched. Thirty-five minutes at the outside.

The large man did not stop at the edge of the woods, instead hurrying through the sparse, winter-bare trees, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

The other two were already at the road when he arrived and had the car started and turned around.

One of them began digging a shallow hole in the soft muck fifty yards off the road while the other helped the large man quickly strip the dead guard of his weapon, ammunition belt, identification, and finally his uniform.

They were finished in less than ten minutes, and a few minutes later the frail, half-naked body was dumped into the hole and covered.

The uniform, weapon, and other things went into the back under an old blanket, the three men climbed into the car, and they were gone as the rain seemed to increase in intensity.

It was just 4:00 A.M.