LITMIR.BIZ

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      “A woman. It’s all in my report.”

      He hesitated for that millisecond that betrays suspicion, then glanced at her almost apologetically. He was thinking Those American women—you hear strange things—they do things with other women—He moved uncomfortably; he felt out of place in this new and more dangerous world. He cleared his throat. “What did she offer you?”

      “It wasn’t an offer. An idea—a Soviet-American thinktank. American money. I would participate at a high level.”

      “A little obvious, maybe?”

      “She said as much—pointed out that three SVRR generals were touring US military bases as we spoke.”

      He made a little throat-clearing sound, a sign of hesitation—this hint of possibly irregular sex embarrassed him—and said gently, “Who is she?”

      “She works for George Shreed. She made that quite clear enough.” She laughed, throatily. “Quite clear. What is it Americans call it—’name-pushing’?”

      “Name-dropping, I believe. George Shreed. Well, well.” Shreed was more or less his opposite number in the CIA, at least so placed that the Director looked upon him as almost a rival in the same bureaucracy. Competitiveness tingled, despite his cold. “People like Shreed never dared reach into my directorate before. It’s a new world.”

      “One in which a Colonel murders twenty-nine of his own people and betrays his country. For money! I know it! I feel it! The bastard!”

      The Director groaned. He was sure that Ouspenskaya would resist any seduction from an immoral American woman. Wouldn’t she? He had managed to clear one nostril. He breathed through it for some seconds. “Did I tell you Gronski left with twenty-four hours’ notice ‘to enter the private sector’? What private sector? Money—the new socialist ideal. Well. All right, renew the contact with Shreed’s woman. Prepare the ground, but do nothing. File a report on everything you do. Put everything in writing for me. Get together with somebody who knows the computer and draft a plan for clearing it, then have them squeeze every drop of data out of it. I want every individual who has worked for Efremov in the last five years interviewed on polygraph—right down to the clerks. You run this, Ouspenskaya. If there are dummy agents he was taking money for, I want details. The individuals won’t know about it; they’ll think everything was straight. If they had suspicions, maybe he paid one or two off. But he was so good I’ll bet nobody got suspicious. But somewhere in the records there will be glitches. You can’t run ghosts and not have it show up.”

      She stood. “You go to bed.”

      He groaned. As she turned to go, he said, “Get what you can on the four agents who were being run out of the place that was attacked. You’ll have to go back to before he compartmentalized them. Maybe even back before we computerized. A big job.”

      “I want to nail him like a new Christ.”

      “Yes, but don’t want it so much that you overlook things that will exonerate him. Remember—maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s under a new pouring of concrete somewhere. Maybe he’s innocent.”

      “He isn’t!”

      He ignored that. “I want everything on those four agents. Especially the American. I think we can do something with that.”

      She didn’t ask him what.

      2010 Zulu. Naples.

      Kim fed Alan a strawberry from her plate and pressed her leg against his. She had forgiven him, because he had wangled an extra day’s liberty and because he had taken her to this elegant, expensive restaurant where Italian men looked at her as if she were the dessert cart. Then, Alan had pointed out three officers from the carrier, then Narc and two guys and a couple of women who wouldn’t have dared look into the same mirror with Kim. Narc’s eyes had bugged out, not only because Kim was such a woman, but because it was the Spy who had her. She giggled and pressed his leg and said she loved him so much.

      “I hate the Navy,” she said happily. Her tongue flicked at a dot of whipped cream at the corner of her mouth. “I’m going to make my father give you a job so you can get out of the Navy and we can stay in bed all the time.”

      He was not immune to being flattered. “You really believe your father’s going to pay me to stay in bed with his daughter?”

      “What Kimberley wants,” she said, with a tiny smile, “Kimberley gets.”

      Her father was a big shot in Florida. The Hoyts had a huge house on the beach near Jacksonville; Alan had got lost in it, trying to find the head. Her brother had laughed at him for that. Alan hadn’t liked him, a muscled twenty-year-old who spent his spare time on a jet ski and talked a lot about reverse discrimination. He had called Alan “admiral.” Something in his posture, his aggressiveness, had challenged Alan, as if they were rivals. The father had looked on at this with a small smile.

      “I don’t think I could work for your father,” Alan said now.

      “Oh, if the price is right, I bet you could.” She kissed him. “And the price will be right.”

      She smiled. She licked her lips. He thought she was about the most desirable thing he’d ever seen. He began to tell her the story of landing into the net.

       5

      Their first liberty ports behind them, the Roosevelt and the Jefferson moved down the Med in seemingly separate paths. The two great ships transited the Suez three weeks apart, then lingered briefly within a hundred miles of each other at the mouth of the Red Sea. Roosevelt docked at Mombasa; Jefferson forged eastward toward the Gulf, where Iran and Iraq, exhausted from their war, still lay spitting and snarling at each other like wounded cats. For Alan Craik, the carrier became his life. A meeting with Kim in Bahrain was dreamlike, quickly relegated to a vague background of fantasies and remembrance, against which his real world played. Real life was intelligence and flight, the CVIC and Christine. Now, he was like a hungry man let loose at a banquet table: he devoured and devoured and wanted more.

      Over those three months, the two carriers approached each other and moved away, partners in a vast dance discernible only to their captains—never close enough to make a common nuclear target, never far enough apart to foreclose joint operations. Four months after they had passed Gibraltar, they reached designated points within range of the Iranian coast and began to brief their aircrews on the mission labeled KNIGHTHOOD.

      On the scale of air warfare, the carrier is a siege engine; its target is a vast fortress of electronics and missiles. Night is the preferred environment, when men’s eyes fail and the side with the best electronic vision wins.

      On the night sea, the deck of the carrier is a vision from some ancient legend, lit by flashes like lightning, tense with the nervous movements of men, raucous with sounds like the forges of Vulcan. The senses are battered by the power of the thing, the urgency and vigor of its component parts. Planes land in a roar and flash of sparks or leap into the air from hidden catapults. All around, men labor in shifting, flickering light, while the deck vibrates with the power of the screws and the planes and the machinery, and you feel the vibration in your very bones. The smell of JP-5, the lifeblood of naval aviation, is everywhere.

      Beneath this sensual assault is intellectual wonder that the engine works. Men scurry through the noise, the patches of light and blackness, the danger; mysterious instructions whisper down dozens of radio channels; planes are fueled, repaired, launched, recovered, given ordnance, checked for weight, preflighted, tied down, chocked, released, rolled, towed; alerts are set and manned; while high overhead those aloft conduct their missions, talk to the tower, talk to each other, refuel in the air, prepare to land, parts of the great engine even while distant from it. Below the flight deck, intelligence plans

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