Spycraft - Melton [86]
So, despite all the planning and preparation that came before, the final decision of “go, no go” was Ken’s alone. With the park goers bustling around him, he paused, took several deep breaths of the chilly spring air, and decided, “It’s a go.” Entering an isolated section of forest, he quickly changed from his American clothes into the local clothing stuffed in the backpack.
The Russian clothing offered a fair degree of camouflage by blending in among the other drably dressed Soviet citizenry. Soviet clothing, in 1981, had little of the style found in Western fashions. The outfit Ken now sported featured well-worn grays and browns, a brimmed fedora-like hat, inexpensive Russian shoes, a knee-length overcoat, and rough, ill-fitting trousers. He would not have looked out of place in a World War II film among the costumed extras who populated the set of a crowded train station.
Casually draped on one shoulder was the rucksack with its unusual “picnic” supplies. Weighing nearly thirty-five pounds, it contained, along with his original clothing, a twenty-million-dollar investment in advanced U.S. eavesdropping equipment designed to extract and record signals from lead-sheathed communications cables the Soviets considered tamperproof. If discovered by the KGB, not only would the mission aimed at critical intelligence abruptly end, a technical collection capability that could be applied to similar targets in other parts of the world would be exposed.
Walking through the groves of birch that bordered the park, Ken took a lengthy, circuitous route leading him out of the park and immersing him in Moscow’s general population on the public transportation system. Changing buses several times, his face set impassively, Ken became indistinguishable from the other passengers. The trolleys and buses made their way through Moscow traffic, carrying him far from the manhole on Varshavskoye Shosse and then, eventually, returning him to within walking distance of the target.
At each change of bus and trolley, Ken tried to be the last to step off and observe if anyone else was rushing to get through the closing doors. Still wearing the receivers, he listened for surveillance transmissions corresponding to his actions. Like the vehicular SDR, some elements of Ken’s foot SDR were designed to compel improvisation by his KGB watchers, forcing them into the open by making mistakes. Other elements of the routine allowed him to pick out patterns or repetitions in surrounding faces. Was the young couple he noticed earlier in the park now getting on a bus far from where he first spotted them? Was it the same girl, only now dressed in a different coat and hat? Was the license plate of the car that trailed a respectable distance behind the bus the same one he had seen a half hour earlier?
Ken followed the procedures, moving steadily toward the time when he would make the second crucial decision: entering the manhole. The right choice meant the beginning of an operation that pried open the door to a potential treasure of intelligence. The wrong decision would result in his arrest, identification as a CIA officer, expulsion from the USSR, and collapse of a multimillion-dollar operation that had the attention of the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Exiting the bus at the final stop of his journey, Ken hiked three kilometers to the site. Although he had never been this close to the target before, the maps, casing photos, and satellite images that he had studied for months gave the surroundings a sense of familiarity. The site was “as advertised”— technically promising and operationally vulnerable. Partially obscured by the narrow treeline, the new spring’s foliage offered marginal cover. A curious look in Ken’s direction at the wrong time from the driver of the tractor working the nearby field or the unexpected presence of a Soviet citizen