Death Beam, page 41
Strokin settled in to wait.
It took precisely twelve minutes and fourteen seconds to close tight the steel-and-concrete doors to the Bunker. They were seventy feet wide and just over thirty feet high, and ran on rails. Once they were closed, Marshal Safronov would be effectively sealed off from the outside world. It would take more than blowtorches or a laser gun to penetrate the three-foot-thick shield. It would take a bomb.
The doors were closing as General Khlestov’s Chaika limousine sped toward them down a winding road lit by overhead neon flares. Three more cars followed behind, carrying a total of eighteen men from the Kremlin Guards, a hand-picked elite composed of men selected for their outstanding physical and intellectual prowess. They all stood over six feet tall, and were permanently forbidden to travel abroad. They knew too many of the secrets of the men they protected for the Kremlin to run the risk that one of them might defect or be kidnapped.
There was barely space left between the doors for Khlestov’s car to pass. Unhesitating, he ordered his driver to go through.
As he looked back, he saw that the car behind was jammed between the huge doors like a broken-down jalopy between the presses at a wrecker’s yard.
It didn’t matter, Khlestov decided. What he had to do did not depend on the number of armed men at his disposal. It depended on deeply ingrained habits of obedience, and the awe inspired by a warrant signed by the General Secretary. And the uniform of the Kremlin Guards.
General Khlestov informed the officer in charge of the gatehouse what he thought of his mother’s morals, and the doors slowly ground open again.
No one inside the Bunker challenged the commander of the Kremlin Guards until he reached the marshal’s outer office, where a fair-haired young colonel demanded to know his business. Several Spetsnaz soldiers with automatic weapons were in the room.
“The commander of the Kremlin Guards does not answer to a colonel,” Khlestov informed him. “I am here to see Marshal Safronov, on the orders of the General Secretary.”
The fair-haired colonel continued to bar the way to the marshal’s private office. Khlestov concluded that he was either drunk or a fanatic. The thought crossed his mind that the young officer might have been one of the men who murdered Krylov.
Alone with only a handful of guards inside the Bunker, Khlestov knew that his position was hopeless if he permitted his authority to be challenged, even for a moment.
“Stand aside,” he commanded.
The colonel’s glance wavered for a moment. But he did not budge.
“Very well,” said Khlestov.
The general calmly unholstered his heavy Stechkin pistol, and, with the same absence of haste, leveled it at the colonel’s face and put a 9mm bullet through his forehead. As the colonel’s body rolled on the floor, the men in the room could see that the skin at the back of his head had exploded in the shape of a ragged star where the bullet had exited. Nobody moved.
Except Khlestov, who strode forward and opened the marshal’s door.
Safronov was sitting alone at his desk, with his service pistol on top of the papers in front of him.
“So it’s over,’’ the marshal said.
“It’s over.”
Safronov looked from the pistol on his desk to Khlestov, and back again.
“Will you give me a minute to myself?” the marshal appealed to the commander of the Kremlin Guards. “I think you understand.”
General Khlestov understood.
He stepped backward two paces, clicked his heels, and closed the door.
He did not reopen it until they all heard the shot from inside.
34
WASHINGTON, November 7
The bell captain at the Hay-Adams noticed that the group from Rome TV were carrying unusually bulky equipment. The leggy girl reporter with the inviting smile was actually apologetic about it, explaining that they were planning to erect a mobile stand to get some good shots over the heads of the crowd during the big antinuclear march that was expected to sweep past the White House around the middle of the day. Claudia Fiorella was the name on the elegantly printed card that she left at reception. She laughed and nodded when they explained that, yes, they had reserved a room for her overlooking the White House on the other side of Lafayette Square, but, no, the management would definitely prefer that filming not be done from inside the hotel. She had an engaging manner. And the way she moved her hips under her daringly cut tunic dress of pink suede did not escape the attention of the men who happened to be standing about in the hotel lobby.
The Italian television crew were not the last guests to check into the hotel before the first shouts of the antinuclear protesters began to be heard as they tramped along Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House. An exorbitantly long pearl-gray limousine with blacked-out windows pulled up the drive just after noon. The distinctive baggage checks on the passenger’s luggage suggested that he had recently flown the Concorde to New York, presumably coming from Paris or London. He wore an expensive tailored suit whose stripes were too bold, and a tie that was rather less subdued than a peacock’s tail. This was clearly a man on whom Beau Brummell’s admonition that elegance was invisible would have been wasted. Yet he had had the good taste to choose the reserved, decorous Hay-Adams over some of the more showy hotels favored by moneyed Middle East visitors to America’s capital. He signed the register as Mr. Kamal, from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He left the porter a tip that was big enough to win an effusive show of gratitude, but not so big as to invite disrespect.
The Arab visitor’s facade of urbane confidence cracked as soon as he had double-locked his door. He tore off his dark glasses, tugged loose his tie, and splashed water over his face and neck in the bathroom to wash away the sweat that had been accumulating since he had decided to claim his reservation at the Hay-Adams. Then he fished around in one of his bags for the bottle of Black Label he had packed. He swigged the liquor straight from the bottle, which did not bear any duty-free seals. The man with the Concorde tags had bought his whisky at a discount liquor store in Bethesda, Maryland. He had been in need of it that morning.
He turned on the television set in his room to catch the end of the news bulletin. As if in hope that something that appeared on the screen might contradict the reality of what he had watched on the TV news at breakfast time. The newscaster was summarizing the day’s headlines. The main story, as at 8:00 that morning, was from Moscow. The screen was filled again with banner-waving women and Youth Pioneers, strutting Red Army soldiers, rocket launchers and motorized artillery. It was the traditional show of strength that the Soviet leaders organized to commemorate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. “But the big news from Moscow,’’ the announcer’s voice came over the videotape, “is that one of the most familiar Soviet leaders is missing from the podium. He is Marshal Safronov, the Defense Minister. His absence is all the more remarkable because today’s parade is normally regarded as one of the most important occasions in the entire year for the Soviet armed forces, the day when they put their muscle on display and exhibit their latest hardware. Marshal Safronov’s absence from the parade, for which no official explanation has been given, has intensified speculation that he may have fallen victim to a palace coup. Diplomatic observers say that the power struggle that has been raging in the Kremlin since Brezhnev’s death may have been resolved in favor of General Secretary Manilov and KGB chief Strokin.” The camera zoomed in to show the two men’s faces as they stood, shoulder to shoulder with the other members of the Politburo, on the podium. Strokin looked as if he was greatly enjoying the parade. His gold-rimmed glasses actually appeared to twinkle.
Sammy Hamad switched off the TV set in disgust. He sat down, but jumped up again immediately and started pacing back and forth across the room, from the door to the window. He would pause for a moment, each time, at the window that faced the White House. There would be no rest for him until he had seen this thing through.
Sammy Hamad had not been initiated into the secret intrigues of the men who ruled Russia and had only a hazy conception of what the fall of Marshal Safronov would mean. But he strongly suspected that it was somehow connected to the communications problems that he had experienced in recent days. When he had first been called into action, the message had come from the bookseller, Malinovsky. It had been through Malinovsky that he had received his instructions to kill Max Zimmer and to scare off the English spy, Charles Canning. Similarly, it had been Malinovsky who had passed on the order to act on November 7 according to the agreed plan. Sammy Hamad had been told to check back at regular intervals right up until the last moment for confirmation that the order was still valid. But then his contact had vanished. No one at Malinovsky’s bookstores admitted to knowing where he had gone. Malinovsky himself had omitted explaining his disappearance to the Palestinian or producing someone to take charge of communications in his place. He had simply vanished, and left Sammy Hamad running loose.
Until he received the abort signal. He had picked it up that morning on his transceiver in the safe house in Bethesda—a squirt transmission relayed direct from Moscow via one of the orbital satellites that told him, in the space of less than one second, that the operation that he had been preparing for months had been called off. All teams were ordered to leave the United States by the safest route available. On no account was contact to be made with any Soviet diplomatic mission. The style of the message was different from those that Hamad had received through similar channels in the past. He was not practiced enough in espionage to be able to recognize the signature of an individual operator when he had slowed down the recorded message and replayed it, carefully translating the code. But he knew that whoever was his ultimate control in Moscow had changed.
Perhaps that was the reason for the revealing slip in the message, which referred not merely to his team but to “all teams.” That phrase had severely wounded Sammy Hamad’s pride. Prior to receiving the new signal, it had never occurred to him that he was not alone in his mission—alone, that is, apart from those he selected to work under him, whether they were contract killers like the ones he hired in Miami, or an old girlfriend he had first picked up in a training camp outside Aden. Sammy Hamad had not been pleased to discover that Moscow had arranged for him to have competition in carrying out the biggest assignment of his career. It implied a lack of confidence. He had deserved better of his employers. The media had built a mythology around terrorist leaders like Carlos. But compared to himself, Sammy Hamad believed, Carlos was a pop entertainer.
It was not in the Palestinian’s character to ignore, or forgive, an affront to his dignity of this proportion. So he did not acknowledge the abort signal. Let his faceless controllers in Moscow—whoever they now happened to be—imagine whatever they liked. He would go ahead with the operation alone. The others in his team would obey without question, because he would not inform them that the original orders had been countermanded. He would show Moscow that he could succeed on his own, without the benefit of other people’s planning or operational intelligence.
Besides, he believed, an American President who had openly pledged his support for Israel and the Zionist cause deserved to die.
If Sammy Hamad had been privy to Marshal Safronov’s broader plan and the reasons why it would never be carried out now, his mind would probably have been the same. He was moved by a sense of fatality. He could no more turn back than a bullet that has already left the barrel of a gun.
They made a curious foursome, Sally Sherwin thought as she intercepted the stares from other diners in the restaurant of the Hay-Adams. Those who found their mere appearance fascinating, like the new Senator from Mississippi at the corner table, would be still more intrigued if they knew the actual relationships between them. Melanie Toussaint, who maintained that Washington was part of the South, had dressed outrageously for the occasion in a butterfly hat complete with a veil of antique lace, long gloves, and a billowing dress with a pattern of tiny roses. Charles was fussing over her, pointing things out on the menu.
Sally had not yet adjusted sufficiently to the surprise of her first meeting with the black singer to decide whether or not she felt jealous of her. Could you be jealous when it was so hard to begin to make comparisons between yourself and the object of that jealousy? Watching her with Charles, Sally felt an electricity that passed between them. She had to admit that she liked Melanie: the girl was quick and bright and uninhibited, radiating a spontaneous warmth to her as well as to the men. But she could see, too, that men felt a live sexuality in her presence. Even Dick Hammond was sensitive to it, sitting there at her elbow with a martini in his hand, looking as if he hadn’t been to sleep for a week.
It was a sort of celebration that they had all made it through. If it was strange for Sally to be sitting there with her lover, her ex-husband, and his current mistress, well, that was less odd than what all of them had had to live with over the past two months. Between them, she realized, they might have helped to prevent a war. She trembled inwardly at the thought of what today, November 7, might have brought to their world.
Charles was in an ebullient mood, proposing toasts.
"Here's to you as long as you live," he recited,
"As long as you live may you want to,
May you want to as long as you live."
It was in crashingly bad taste, given the situation, but Sally found herself joining in the second stanza that Charles had taught her in London years before.
"If I'm asleep when you want to, wake me.
If I don't want to, make me."
Melanie giggled, Dick perked up a bit, and the Senator from Mississippi looked distinctly shocked.
“I want to go and ask the Senator for his views on sex,” said Melanie in a stage whisper.
“Don’t you dare!” Sally said.
“Why not?” Charles encouraged his girlfriend. “I think it’s a wonderful idea. The Senator seems to believe that extramarital sex is a greater threat to civilization as we know it than Marshal Safronov.” At the mention of the marshal’s name, Canning’s expression became suddenly grave. “Is it confirmed that Safronov has been executed?” he asked Dick Hammond.
“Nothing definitive yet,” Hammond responded. “We’re expecting to hear any minute. Behind that circus show in Red Square, Moscow is being turned inside out.”
None of them paid any attention to the pretty girl in pink suede who hovered at the entrance to the restaurant for a moment before darting downstairs into the basement arcade.
The fiberglass tube was almost five feet long, but was so light that even with the trigger mechanism attached, Sammy Hamad could lift it with his thumb and forefinger. When he fitted it to his shoulder, most of the tube projected over his back.
“Now the rocket,” he said to the curly-haired man who was in charge of Claudia Fiorella’s sound equipment.
Gingerly, they fitted the rocket into the tube, which was about as thick as Sammy Hamad’s sturdy forearm. The weapon was complete.
“Now we wait,’’ said the Palestinian.
The sam 7 rocket, described in NATO manuals as the Grail missile, a “man-portable antiaircraft heat-seeking device,” was the dream of every terrorist organization. A dream that was attainable for many, thanks to the large number of sam 7s that the Soviet defense industry had exported to pro-Moscow regimes in countries like Cuba, Libya, and South Yemen. Handling the sam 7 had been one of the shortest lessons in Sammy Hamad’s course at the Sanprobal military academy in the Soviet Crimea. Firing the rocket was so simple that even a child or a mental defective could hardly flunk the first attempt. All that was required was the patience to wait the six seconds required for the rocket’s heat-detection system to lock onto the engine of a target aircraft.
The rocket that’ Sammy Hamad held in his hands could attain a speed of more than twelve hundred miles per hour. Roughly one and a half times the speed of sound. It could be fired at a plane flying as low as fifty feet, or as high as fifteen hundred feet. Once the trigger was pulled, a capsule of liquid gas was released, bringing about a sudden and extreme reduction in the temperature of the heat-sensing device installed in the nose cone of the rocket. This would enable the tracking system to home in on the heat emanating from the engine of an aircraft. Once the heat-sensing device had locked onto its target—which normally took about six seconds—the rocket would automatically be launched. Its two-stage propulsion system would allow it to develop a speed of five hundred yards per second in less time than it would take to say, “The President of the United States is dead.”
Sammy Hamad had not had to trouble with the mechanics of smuggling the weapon into the United States. It had come in the diplomatic bag. But if the rocket was captured—as it was almost certain to be—nobody would be able to prove that it originated in the Soviet Union. Moscow had seen to that. The weapon was secondhand. It had been reclaimed from the Libyan stockpiles. It even had Arabic markings on it. The operation would look like the work of Arab terrorists. And so, in a sense, it was.
Hamad was surprised that sam 7s had not been used more frequently by terrorist groups. During the Rhodesian war, Nkomo’s guerrillas had used sam 7s to bring down two civilian airliners. There had been some fumbling efforts by Palestinians in Italy and in Kenya to use the rockets against Israeli planes. But the true potential of the weapon had yet to be exploited. Sammy Hamad would demonstrate what it was.
Carefully, as if he were moving rare porcelain, he laid the launcher with its rocket across the arms of the chair by the window in Claudia’s suite. A breeze stirred the drapes, which had been pulled tightly shut against the possible curiosity of anyone on the other side of Lafayette Square who might happen to be scanning the area with binoculars.
