Purpose of Evasion (10 page)

Simultaneously, a Soviet EORSAT spy satellite had detected the BRT transmission and sent the data to a similar tracking facility in Pechenga on the Kola Peninsula. The coded message couldn’t be deciphered but the signal’s geographic coordinates were immediately radioed to the Alpha.

“He’s south of the Straits,” Solomatin said. He had no way of
knowing the signal had come from a BRT and, as Duryea had planned, assumed it came from the
Cavalla.
“Come to zero two zero. All ahead full.”

In Fort Belvoir’s KH-11 tracking room, the technician reacted to a line of side-by-side swirls that had surfaced from the Alpha’s twin props and were tracing across his screen. Though not detectable from ships or planes, the pattern was clearly visible to a high-altitude satellite and had measurable speed and direction. The technician dispatched the following to the
Cavalla
:

FM: RTS KEYHOLE/FORT BELVOIR

TO: USS CAVALLA

SURFACE WAKE DETECTED AT 364504N/065741E.

10 MILES SOUTH STRAITS OF GIBRALTAR.

COURSE 035. SPEED 44 KNOTS.

McBride whistled when he saw it. “He took the bait, sir. He’s really cutting a hole in the water.”

“Not to mention his throat,” Duryea said.

AT ABOUT
the same time in Upper Heyford, the sun hovered low over the English countryside.

A good omen, Larkin thought, as the golden rays streamed through the canopy, warming the cockpit. He dipped a wing, putting the bomber on a heading for the air base, and thumbed the radio transmit button.

“Upper Heyford, this is Viper-Two,” he said. “Request clear to land.”

“We have you, Viper-Two,” the tower replied. “You’re CTL on one seven west. Winds are at one three five; ten knots.”

“Copy that, Heyford.”

The two F-111s circled to side-by-side landings and taxied to the hangar at the far end of the field. Larkin popped the canopy and climbed down from the cockpit. The name on his flight suit read
MAJ W. SHEPHERD.
All uniform badges and insignia were fastened with Velcro and easily changed.

He and Applegate had test-flown the F-111s several times since Larkin’s return from Holy Loch. Special Forces aviators served as their weapons systems officers.

A cable was waiting for them in the office when they got to the hangar. Larkin tore it open, smiled at Moncrieff s message, and handed it to Applegate. It read:

READY TO PROCEED WITH TRANSACTION.

14

SHEPHERD
had been comatose for several days when his eyes finally fluttered open. He was in an unfamiliar bed, an IV sticking into his arm, the suffocating smells of illness filling his head.

Two security guards, making their morning rounds of the train yards, had found him—he was blue from the cold and naked, save for a torn T-shirt and a pair of skivvies. The derelicts had picked him clean: flight suit, boots, watch, dogtags, tape recorder, and wallet.

The guard with the metal chevrons pinned to his black cableknit returned to the security office at the gate, scooped up the phone, and dialed 999, London’s toll-free emergency number.

A short time later, a white ambulance, its blue roof flasher glowing eerily in the ground fog, came racing down Leyton Road. The clumsy-looking van went round the eighteen-wheelers queued at the entrance to the yards and across the flyover that bridged the expanse of tracks, continuing to where Shepherd had been found.

Shepherd was taken to The London Hospital on Mile End Road. The dreary buildings of soot-blackened brick were well suited to the tough East End neighborhood, which had been terrorized by Jack the Ripper a century before. Since the end of World War II, Whitechapel’s traditionally ethnic population of European Jews had gradually given way to Indians, who were now being supplanted by poverty-level blacks and Pakistanis.

The men’s ward was on the second floor of the main building. The glossy white walls had long ago turned a pale nicotine yellow. A single row of lights hung overhead, the illumination dimmed by the dead flies in the bottom of the milk glass globes. Forty beds, separated by clothes lockers, lined the sides of the long, narrow room. A rectangular card at the foot of each bed displayed the
patient’s name in letters boldly printed with a black marker. Shepherd’s name card was blank.

Administrators had no clue to his identity. But that wasn’t unusual among the many indigents treated here. Like them, Shepherd was dirty, battered, and unshaven. The fact that he wasn’t emaciated or suffering from exposure led them to conclude he was a victim of an all too familiar scenario: New arrivals to the street were constantly being preyed upon by the bands of hardened regulars. The army of homeless that roamed the city was growing at an alarming rate; engineers were becoming almost as common as laborers. Following standard procedure, London’s Metropolitan Police had been notified; a check of their missing persons files shed no light on Shepherd’s identity.

A nurse making her rounds noticed Shepherd pushing up onto an elbow and hurried to his side.

“Go easy now,” she whispered, delighted that he had regained consciousness.

“Where am I?” he wondered feebly.

“In luck is what I’d say,” the sprightly woman quipped, before hurrying off to fetch a doctor.

“Can you tell me who you are?” the doctor asked in a gentle singsong cadence as he leaned over Shepherd, examining him. He was a rail-thin Indian with coal-black eyes and a soft smile.

“Walt, Walt Shepherd,” Shepherd muttered, his head throbbing. “Major, United States Air Force.”

“I see,” the young doctor replied with the amused smile of a man accustomed to hearing grandiose claims: Jesus Christ and John Lennon were the most common.

Shepherd heard the skepticism in his tone and slowly recited his serial number, adding, “I’m a pilot.”

“Well, you’ve been with us for several days, Major,” the doctor said, beginning to sense that Shepherd’s claim might be genuine. He went on to explain how Shepherd got there and that they had been unable to identify him. “I’ll be happy to let your people know you’re with us, if you’ll tell me who to call.”

Shepherd just stared at him blankly, suddenly overwhelmed by the terrifying events that started coming back in a chilling rush: a montage of gunfire and blood; of screeching rubber and steel; of bone-crunching collisions and exploding fuel; and of hope, dashed by the cruel shattering of glass against his skull.

“Major Shepherd?” the doctor said, testing his response to the rank. “Major, are you all right?”

“Oh, sorry,” Shepherd finally replied, coming out of it. He winced in pain, his hand going to the bandage on his forehead, where he’d been struck by the bottle. “Hurts. It hurts like hell.”

“Yes, you’ve had a rather nasty knock on the head; actually, more than one,” the doctor replied in his clipped musical cadence, having treated Shepherd for a severe concussion, scalp lacerations, and minor burns on his hands and face. “Now,” he said in a gentle challenge, “you were going to tell me who to call—”

“Applegate,” Shepherd finally replied in a dry whisper. “Major Applegate—Lakenheath.”

It made perfect sense to call him. Shepherd never saw who shot at him from the balcony and had no reason to think it was Applegate. On the contrary, the major was with military intelligence and had conducted a bona fide debriefing after the incident with the Soviet Forgers. Besides, though Larkin and the others who had attacked him were wearing air force uniforms, it went completely against Shepherd’s grain to accept that U.S. military personnel were involved. His unquestioning sense of patriotism wouldn’t allow it.

THAT SAME MORNING,
five hours before its scheduled launch, the raid on Libya was given the final go-ahead.

In the hangar at Upper Heyford, Larkin and Applegate were in a planning room, reviewing mission data at a map-covered plotting table, when one of the Special Forces clerks informed Applegate he had a call. The major left and crossed the hangar to his office to take it. His eyes widened at the doctor’s message, his mind racing to cope with the knowledge that Shepherd was alive.

In The London Hospital, a nurse was at the foot of Shepherd’s bed writing his name on the blank card when the doctor returned. “I’m afraid he insists on talking to you, Major,” he said, displeased at the idea. “I told him more than once you were in discomfort.”

Shepherd nodded and pushed up shakily onto an elbow. His double vision was gone but the moment he sat up, the room started spinning. They lifted him into a wheelchair and took him to the doctor’s office.

“Can you identify these men, Major?” Applegate asked after Shepherd had explained what happened.

“Just one of them,” Shepherd replied weakly. “His name was Larkin . . . Colonel Larkin.”

“Larkin . . .” the heavyset intelligence officer repeated coolly, glad that Shepherd couldn’t see the panic in his eyes. “Doesn’t ring a bell. You sure they were in the military?”

“They looked and sounded like Americans, but—”

“Americans from Charm School,” Applegate interrupted, referring to a Soviet KGB facility that was an exact replica of an American town: Only English was spoken; only American food was served; only American clothing was worn; only KGB agents, being trained to impersonate Americans, lived and worked there. “For all we know that run in with the Forger wasn’t an accident,” Applegate concluded, shrewdly embellishing the lie. “We’ll have you picked up and taken to a military hospital as soon as possible. Meantime, I don’t want anyone else to know you’re alive. Whoever they are, whatever they’re up to, they want you dead. Talk to no one, Major. That means nobody. Not even your wife. They may be watching her; may have tapped her phone trying to get a line on where you’re hiding. Got it?”

“I understand, sir,” Shepherd replied dutifully.

“Good. Now, put the doc back on,” Applegate instructed, going on to impress upon the doctor the need for absolute secrecy and cooperation.

The nurse wheeled Shepherd back to the ward. He fell onto the bed, exhausted. Moments later, she returned carrying his flight suit, name stripe still affixed. It had been washed and folded. His cassette recorder and an envelope were on top of it.

“I think these belong to you, Major,” she said, explaining that a comatose derelict several beds down the line was wearing the flight suit over his clothing when brought in the previous evening. The London Hospital’s casualty room served the entire East End, and there was no other facility in the area where the derelict, who, like Shepherd, had been found comatose in the train yard, could have been taken.

Shepherd’s wallet, credit cards, and identification were gone; but the envelope contained what was left of his cash: $63 and a few British pounds that the derelict, who had assaulted him, hadn’t spent before succumbing to a drug overdose.

IN UPPER HEYFORD,
Applegate had given the news to Larkin, who shuddered at the implications. “This whole fucking mission’s on the bubble,” he lamented bitterly, thinking about Fitzgerald and the DCI’s emotional mandate.

“No need for it to burst,” the big intelligence officer counseled. “Shepherd’s just laying there groggy, waiting to be picked up; and we’ve got people who can handle it.”

The two Special Forces guards who had played the role of SPs were given the task. “Kill him and use the same method of disposal,” Larkin ordered; then he and Applegate returned to the computerized data that had been prepared for each F-111 crew by mission planning in Lakenheath.

Each package had been tailored to a specific target. It contained reconnaissance photographs; a foldout route book of the flight plan; and a sequential list of fly-to-points: latitude, longitude, elevation, and brief description of each, the last of these being the target itself.

ANITA was used to enter the alphanumeric target data into a computer in mission planning headquarters. Once encoded, the entire program was copied to tape; the cassette was inserted into a mission data loader, which was taken to the aircraft and cabled to an input port left of the nose wheel, adjacent to the com-cord jack; then with the push of a button, the target data was transferred from the MDL to the Pave Tack computer.

This entire operation was handled by mission planning technicians; however, neither they nor the MDL were indispensable. The data could have been entered directly into Pave Tack computers by pilot or
WIZZO
via the nav-data entry panel, an alphanumeric keyboard in the cockpit used routinely to correct and update target information in flight.

Larkin and Applegate completed their data review, suited up, and were soon climbing into their F-111s.

The time was 5:13
P.M.
when they took off from Heyford with the EF-111 radar jammers. As they streaked skyward, KC-135 tankers were lumbering into the air from Mildenhall. They rendezvoused over Land’s End at the southeasternmost tip of England with twenty-two F-111F bombers from Lakenheath and one E2C Hawkeye.

The latter was the strike control aircraft, a flying radar installation
that housed the mission commander and his staff. A saucer-shaped antenna atop the fuselage picked up the transponder signal of every F-111 in the strike force and displayed it on a radar screen. Strict radio silence would be maintained throughout the mission, which meant this was the only contact mission command would have with the bombers.

In precisely 7 hours 11 minutes, the F-111s and their Pave Tack systems, capable of acquiring, tracking, and bombing surface targets at high speed in total darkness, would be doing just that—all but two of them.

15

THE TIME
in Washington, D.C., was 12:32
P.M.

Congressman Jim Gutherie had put in a morning’s work and was heading across town in his chauffeured car.

A week had passed since the bombing of the West Berlin disco. Rumors of military reprisals had been rampant but Gutherie hadn’t given them much credence. A hostile act against another nation would have to be cleared with Congress—with
his
committee—in advance, and no effort had been made to do so. He had spent the weekend with campaign aides, mapping out strategy to reverse his continuing slide in the polls.

For years, his wife had been his most trusted political adviser. Since her accident, it was but one of many things in the congressman’s life that had changed. Monday afternoons were another.

The women with whom he spent them were stunningly beautiful, with faces like models, which they sometimes were. Save for fiery tresses and galaxies of freckles sprinkled over her white skin, the redhead was always naked when he arrived. The blond worked in lingerie. Black stockings hugged her endless legs. Garters framed a tuft of golden wool glistening in the shadow of a bottomless teddy. Its bodice skimmed her upright nipples, which were all that kept it from falling.

The idea of being with another woman, while his wife—a passionate sex partner with whom he was still in love—lay in a hospital bed barely alive, tormented him, and he had sought professional guidance.

His committee work and his exposure to top-secret data narrowed the field to a handful of psychiatrists in the District who had the necessary security clearances.

Dr. David Kemper had been recommended by the CIA. His office was in a mansard-roofed structure on Connecticut Avenue. Its separate entrance and exit spared his patients the embarrassment of running into colleagues.

“You know, I’m wired all the time,” Gutherie said as one session began. “I jog, I work out. It still takes me hours to fall asleep. I’m not myself.”

“Well, what do
you
think it means?” Kemper asked from behind his neat moustache.

“Beats me. I’m still in love with my wife and everything. I mean, I don’t even know what that’s got to do with it; but lately, I don’t know.”

“Well, what I hear you saying, Jim,” Kemper said with a trace of a smile, “is that you need to get laid.”

“Yeah? Yeah, I guess I do.”

“Anybody in mind?”

“Sort of.”

Six months had passed since Dr. Kemper supported Gutherie’s suggestion that he visit the turn-of-the-century townhouse behind the wrought-iron fence in the 2000 block of Decatur Place just north of Dupont Circle.

Now Gutherie lay in an elegantly furnished room, the blond’s fingertips tracing over his trembling lips, “lost,” as Sister Mary Janice, his eighth-grade teacher once put it, “in the depraved sins of the flesh.”

Gutherie’s breathing quickened in expectation as the redhead straddled his waist with her freckled thighs, then began sliding slowly backwards, capturing the head of his penis inside her. He shuddered as she continued inching back until her tight wetness consumed him. The soothing sense of security and well-being that Gutherie craved spread over him like a warm blanket.

“Oh, yes,” the blond moaned softly, slowly undoing one of the pastel bows on the front of the teddy; soon her pointed breasts were free of it and one of her large nipples was in Gutherie’s mouth.

“Oh, yes, yes; do we want to make it happen now?” the redhead prompted in a breathy whisper, segueing into a circular motion astride him.

“Yes. Oh God, yes, yes, now. Make it happen now.”

He arched his pelvis, forcing her to grind against it, then began bucking beneath her until he emitted a series of long moans and collapsed into their arms. The congressman was wholly oblivious to the stress of public office and private pain, when suddenly a muffled twitter came from beneath the pile of clothing on the other side of the room.

Gutherie sat up, somewhat disoriented, trying to clear his head. His secretary had strict orders not to beep him at this hour except in an emergency; and she hadn’t, not once, in six months. The congressman pulled the bedding around him, then took the phone from the nightstand and called his office. “What is it?” he asked anxiously when his secretary came on the line. “Something happen to my wife?”

“No, sir,” she replied. “The White House called.”

“The White House?” Gutherie echoed, feeling suddenly out of touch and wondering what was going on.

“You have a meeting with the president at the OEO in half an hour. Twenty-five minutes, now.”

As a ranking member of the Intelligence and Oversight committees, Gutherie was often summoned to such meetings, but rarely on short notice.

The time was 3:58 when he arrived at the Old Executive Office Building across the street from the White House. He was ushered to a conference room, where congressional leaders, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security adviser, the CIA director, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had assembled.

“As you know,” Lancaster began, “the War Powers Act requires, and I quote, ‘that the President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities,’ and that’s why you’ve been invited here today.”

The congressmen sat up straighter in their chairs.

The president entered and, reading from typed notes, explained that the recent wave of terrorism had prompted him to authorize preemptive action. Tripoli and Bengahzi were the targets. When he finished reading, he pocketed his notes and left the meeting.

Lancaster presented the intercepted cables as evidence linking Libya to the Berlin disco bombing, then laid out the details of the operation.

“What about civilian casualties?” a senator asked.

“Every effort has been made to minimize collateral damage, sir,” the chairman of the joints chiefs replied.

“Where do our allies stand?” another wondered.

“France and Spain have denied us use of their air space,” the secretary of state replied.

“Frogs,” Kiley muttered bitterly.

“Israel, Canada, and Mrs. Thatcher, of course, are with us,” the secretary concluded.

“She better be,” a congressman intoned. “She owes us one for the Falklands.”

“She owes Qaddafi one for that cop he murdered,” Kiley said, referring to Constable Yvonne Fletcher, who was gunned down outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in 1984. He didn’t remind them that the pistol had been traced to a shipment of weapons procured by renegade CIA agents.

“How much time we have?” Gutherie asked.

“ETA to target is two hours fifty minutes,” Lancaster replied boldly, fully anticipating protest.

“Our bombers are in the air?” Gutherie exclaimed.

“Correct,” the CJC replied. “F-111s are en route as we speak. Intruders have yet to be launched.”

Uneasy glances flicked between the congressmen.

“Now that Congress has been consulted,” Gutherie said sardonically, “what if some of us object?”

“The attack can be called off within ten minutes of strike time,” the defense secretary replied.

“If that objection is unanimous,” Kiley chimed in slyly, knowing the chance for such an accord was zero.

No objections were voiced, let alone a unanimous one. For in truth, none denied that the United States had been pushed to the limit or that the evidence was compelling. But Gutherie and the others
were
wondering: Why at night? When despite popular conception, daylight bombing techniques afforded a much higher degree of accuracy; a fact the Israelis had recently demonstrated by destroying eighteen Syrian missile batteries—against antiaircraft defenses far superior to Libyan installations—without losing a single aircraft. Furthermore, why use F-111s from faraway England? Why not hit
both
targets with carrier-based bombers?

It was pointless to ask now, to cross-examine the president’s staff in the tense hours just prior to the strike. The media would do that. Indeed, within hours the litany of thorny questions would be asked.

Only Bill Kiley knew the answers would be lies.

The DCI had been feeling the strain of his years lately but he
bristled with energy now. Fitzgerald and the other hostages would soon be delivered from their harrowing nightmare. He had no doubt that the cost, however steep, was more than worth it, and that CIA would get the credit. Victory and vindication. It was so close Kiley could taste it.