Sixteen security-police and maintenance-worker uniforms from Olympic Village. Both male and female uniforms.
All absolutely essential for access into the closely guarded Olympic Village that day.
The Russians began to step into their Levis and Sassoon blue jeans. They proudly buttoned their new French and California designer sport shirts and put on Bally and Florsheim slip-ons.
At five minutes to eight, dressed like Russian workers or Russian police, carrying satchels filled with still more uniforms, the four terrorists walked back across Pushkin Mall as if nothing had happened.
Comparatively speaking, nothing had.
Olympic Village was still asleep.
The Dachau group split off into ones and twos at a prearranged time. In that way, more than twenty individual arrests had to be made to defuse the strike plan.
The Newspaperman strolled along with the tightly packed crowd moving toward the Luzhniki Sports Complex.
The Architect sat and watched the first qualifying heats of the bicycle races.
The Medic viewed a curiously nostalgic folk-singing group in Karl Marx Park.
Alix was hidden away in the rear of a Soviet maintenance van. Beside her, the leader of Dachau Two, the Führer, looked down at a handsome gold wristwatch.
“Ten-thirty. Time for the first of our many surprises for the day.”
From three-thirty in the morning on, risking arrest and God only knew what other KGB punishments, David and Harry had unofficially patrolled the Olympic Village area of Moscow—first on foot, then in a Zhiguli Fiat that was as nervous and jumpy as they were.
The two Americans made all the obvious stops, and they played a few wild hunches as well.
They checked both U.S. dormitory sections. The dorms for the East and West Germans. The Lenin wing where the Russian athletes were stabled nine to a room.
They also visited the 103,000-seat Lenin Stadium, where the track-and-field events would begin as early as 7:00
A.M
.; and the Rossiya and Metropole Hotels, where several million dollars’ worth of American TV and film talent was getting its beauty sleep and ego massages.
Around ten-thirty, the two bone-tired men slumped into a Russian steam bath—a
banya
—located in the vicinity of the beautiful Novodevishy Convent. Harry and David decided they had to rest for a moment now. The Russian steam bath would have to substitute for a night of sleep.
Minutes after David and Harry Callaghan entered the
banya
, Arthur Abrams Silver, occasional columnist for the
New York Times
, author of the best-selling Washington roman à clef
Kingdom Come
, made his seemingly fumbling way alongside a row of aluminum press tables set up on the grassy tribune inside Lenin Stadium.
“Arturo! Arturo!” An old Algonquin Hotel drinking companion from the
Times
tried to get the myopic writer’s attention as he hurried past.
“Hey, yo, Arthur!” someone from the
Daily News
yelled—Pete Hamill’s younger brother, Silver thought,
some
youngish longhaired man.
In the meantime, Arthur Silver had been almost completely mesmerized by the blazing green athletic field spread out before him.
His mind was already composing one of his famous columns.
Sempiternal Lenin Stadium in the Luzhniki Sports Complex. Giant main arena. Sports palace: seven over-Olympic-size swimming pools where the people of Moscow could swim, even when it was forty below freezing. Ten gargantuan football patches. Four separate field houses. And never closed to the public a single day since it had opened in 1956
.
Over the slanting rooftop, flags from 140 countries snapped in the crisp breeze blowing up from the nearby Moskva River.
Out on the buzzing green field, gifted Olympic athletes were sweating and grunting, sprinting and leaping, under the high Moscow skies. It gave Arthur Silver goose bumps just being there.
Here was the real Olympics. Track and field. Frank Shorter, Valerie Borzov, Victor Saneyev, Mike Boit, John Akii. Silver actually knew most of them. Just as he had known Bill Russell, Wilma Rudolph, Cassius Clay. He even loved some of the young amateur athletes, he thought, with a sudden twinge of sadness.
Halfway down through the jumble of reporters and announcers, Arthur Silver suddenly stopped his sentimental walk.
He stood directly behind two Russian TV personalities. A man and a blond woman, both dressed as if it were 1954 again. These two were in charge of announcing all events and their results to the enormous crowd packed inside Lenin Stadium.
The descriptions and results were announced first in Russian, then in English, finally in German. Occasional special announcements were made in Japanese, French, Ethiopian, or the native language of anyone winning a gold medal.
“I am Arthur Silver of the
New York Times
,” the columnist said, insinuating his body between those of the two Russian announcers.
At the same time, he was pressing a 41-magnum Luger against the woman announcer’s right temple, just below the sloping rim of her wide-banded beige hat.
“I want the two of you to listen very carefully now. Are you both comfortable conversing in English?”
A most cautious nod from the Russian woman. A curt nod from the feather-hatted male announcer.
Word began to filter around the reporter’s plaza that someone up there had a gun out.
“Who has a gun out? Where?”
“Oh my God, it’s Arthur Silver.”
“It’s Arthur Silver from the bloody
New York Times!
”
It was also the Newspaperman from the Storm Troop, formerly from Dachau
Konzentrationslager
.
The Newspaperman spoke very slowly, careful that the Russian man and woman understood every important word.
“At this moment, there is a large, professional, Jewish attack force inside Lenin Stadium.
“We are located randomly in this large crowd you see here. Each of us has a plastic bomb. Each bomb has the capability of killing thousands of people. Why are you shaking your head?”
The Russian woman looked into the cloudy bifocals of Arthur Silver. “We happen to know that Lenin Stadium has been electronically checked for explosive devices,” she said to him. “What you say cannot be true. It is a bluff.”
The Newspaperman smiled and snapped open his battered brown briefcase.
Inside the case, the Russians could see, was a maze of twisted white, blue, and red wires; a complicated little generator; a puddle of pinkish
plastiques
. It certainly appeared to be a small potent bomb, just as the Newspaperman had said.
Arthur Silver now put away his revolver. He placed his hand on the bomb’s detonator instead.
“Before we discuss this any further, I would like you seriously to consider what happens if all of these nonexistent bombs are detonated. Please look around you at the thousands of people in these grandstands.”
“Bastard,” the Russian woman said.
“We will do whatever it is that you wish,” said the man.
“All right then.” Arthur Silver took a deep breath. He looked around at the brilliant colors shot all through the stadium and felt slightly dizzy.
“We would like all the track-and-field events stopped first. Please ask the athletes to sit down wherever they are on the field at this moment.
“After that, one of you will telephone General Iranov at the Olympic Security Headquarters. You’ll tell General Iranov or Colonel Belov what has happened here. You’ll tell them the danger is considerable. And imminent.”
The Newspaperman had to stop for a second. His teeth were chattering as he tried to make his mouth work. He was shivering as if it were zero-degree weather. He said one final prayer that what they were doing was the right thing.
“All right.” Arthur Silver managed to speak again. “I’d like you to make the first announcement. I’d like the lady to speak to the crowd. Would you please stop the Olympic Games now.”
Settling into the Russian
banya
was a little like taking a sauna in the boiler room of a big-city apartment building, David considered. It was like bathing in the gray concrete tunnels and cracked-plaster mystery rooms beneath his and Heather’s old New York apartment building on Central Park West.
Inside the steam-bath rooms, there were strange Russian men ranging from thirteen to maybe a hundred. They sat like zombies on stone steps that were arranged like miniature grandstands around red-hot coal stoves.
Dripping flesh hung on sloping shoulder bones. Flesh hung on wide hips and ribs like so much wet cloth.
Brownish penises and testicles lay between withered legs like small, dead sea creatures.
Some Russian grandfathers,
dedushkas
, were congregated near the central stone oven. A few of the elderly Russians were flogging themselves with leafy twigs which turned out to be birch, and which were
de rigueur
if you wanted to smell like a birch tree after your
banya
.
Harry Callaghan sat on the lowest stone step and ordered two Zhigulsky beers from an appropriately shriveled Russian bath attendant.
“Tell him just one.” David found that he could barely whisper in the heat. “No beer for me, thanks.”
“You’ll want it when it comes.”
“Never mind. I’ll want it when it comes,” David said to the uncomprehending attendant, who said
da, da, da
, turned, and shuffled away.
As it happened, David wanted the beer much, much sooner than it came.
Not twenty seconds after he sat down on his burning step, the bathhouse air was so bad it began to sear his throat and nostrils.
“So
you’re
the one who’s trying to kill me,” David rasped to Harry Callaghan.
“Here. Now.”
The agent shrugged. Maybe yes. Maybe no.
The beers finally came, and David let a thin, cool stream roll down the blistered insides of his throat.
All of a sudden his head cleared rather violently. His ears popped the way they can after a tricky airplane ride.
David could smell ammonia way back inside his brain. It was a good feeling for about thirty seconds. He felt real smart.
More comfortable now, David settled back on his stone step. It was an odd, odd feeling, this being a sort of pathetic junior-grade detective, he was thinking. Realizing that you were probably going to understand a particularly disturbing crime case,
not
because you’d succeeded in catching the offenders, but rather because the criminals were about to brazenly commit the offense, then rub your nose in it.
David looked up, and Harry was in the middle of saying something.
“… you see, I should be racing all engines now. Instead … I just feel tired of the whole thing. … I see Alix’s face sometimes. Your brother’s face from television that first night … I just feel bad, and very tired. It’s never been this way for me before. Not in nineteen years of this kind of work. A career of it. When I got up at three I felt very, very alone in the hotel room.”
“Everybody feels like shit right now,” David said. “This is the most frustrating time of all. I want to go punch in the Kremlin walls. The Russians are acting so stupid I can’t believe it.”
Right then, Harry Callaghan suddenly punched David hard in the thigh. It was a touch of strange, locker-room camaraderie. Something very weird. David’s right leg cramped up as if it were part of the stone stairway. The muscle hurt like hell.
Then David surprised himself a little.
He hit Harry back. A reflex action.
Get hit, hit back
.
David caught the veteran government man right on the point of his dimpled chin. Harder than he’d meant, or thought he’d meant.
Harry Callaghan spit out a mouthful of blood and foam. His eyes were all watery.
Harry laughed. Then both Harry and David started laughing like certifiable maniacs in the cascading steam of the
banya
.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” David said, finally managing to speak. “I must be completely nuts already. I’m gone. Say good night, Gracie.”
“We’ve just gone a little cuckoo,” Harry explained to the ancient Russian men who were gaping at them. “Just two American madmen.
Moohahaha!
–
It was the only escape they had left. The short burst of manic laughing was the only thing that made any sense at all.
Somehow, David and Harry managed to get their clothes on again. By eleven o’clock they were back out on one of the broad Moscow avenues.
Right there, they met an American father, mother, and two kids in Disneyland shirts, rushing back from the direction of Olympic Village.
“Are you Americans?” the father said to David.
“Yes, we are,” David answered.
“Terrorists have just seized the Olympics,” the American man said, the most unbelievably pained look coming over his face.
David’s heart started to pound and jump up and down. He tried to walk beside the family.
“What happened? Please stop and tell us what’s happened. Please.”
The man’s wife slowed and turned to face David.
“They struck at the hotel where all the NBC-TV people are staying. They’re supposed to have bombs. Everything is suddenly unbelievably confusing and horrible.”
David Strauss stopped walking. He let the family go on. That was when he noticed that everyone else on the streets of Moscow was running.
Twelve noon, the Kremlin.
The eleven men in the windowless, olive-green conference room were all “super-comrades.” Some of them were dangerously overweight. They had short haircuts, oatmeal-white faces, square-shouldered suits.
The eleven men were bureaucrats of the highest rank and order. They ruled Russia.
“This was clearly a show of force,” said General Yuri Iranov, a Politburo member by virtue of being chairman of the KGB. “The terrorists are trying to demonstrate their power over us, you see.”
“An impressive demonstration,” one of the other Russian leaders mumbled angrily.