The Cardinal of the Kremlin - Tom Clancy [220]
"There you go," the pilot said when the right frame came up. "Good conditions for it: clear, cold, low humidity, good sun angle. We didn't even leave any contrails."
"Thank you, Major," the sergeant said as she examined the film from the KA-91 panoramic camera. "Looks like we have a dirt road coming off this highway here, snakes over the little ridge and looks like a house trailer, car parked about fifty yards-another one, covered up some. Two cars, then. Okay, what else ?"
"Wait a minute-I don't see the second car," an FBI agent said.
"Here, sir. The sun's reflecting off something, and it's too big to be a Coke bottle. Car windshield, probably. Maybe a back window, but I think it's the front end."
"Why?" the agent asked. He just had to know.
She didn't look up. "Well, sir, if it was me, and I was hiding a car, like, I'd back it in so's I could get out quick, y'know?"
It was all the man could do not to laugh. "That's all right, Sarge."
She cranked to a new frame. "There we go-here's a flash off the bumper, and that's probably the grille, too. See how they covered it up? Look by the trailer. That might be a man there in the shadows " She went to the next frame. "Yep, that's a person." The man was about six feet, athletic, with dark hair and a shadow on his face suggesting that he'd neglected to shave today. No gun was visible.
There were thirty usable frames of the site, eight of which were blown up to poster size. These went to the hangar with the UH-1N. Gus Werner was there. He didn't like rush jobs any more than the people in that trailer did, but his choices were as limited as theirs had been.
"So, Colonel Filitov, we now have you to 1976."
"Dmitri Fedorovich brought me with him when he became Defense Minister. It simplified things, of course."
"And increased your opportunities," Vatutin observed.
"Yes, it did."
There were no recriminations now, no accusations, no comments on the nature of the crime that Misha had committed. They were past that for the moment. The admission had come first as it always did, and that was always hard, but after that, once they'd been broken or tricked into confessing, then came the easy part. It could last for weeks, and Vatutin had no idea where this one would end. The initial phase was aimed at outlining what he'd done. The detailed examination of each episode would follow, but the two-phase nature of the interrogation was crucial to establishing a cross-referencing index, lest the subject later try to change or deny particular things. Even this phase, glossing over the details as they went, horrified Vatutin and his men. Specifications for every tank and gun in the Soviet Army, including the variations never sent to the Arabs-which was as good as giving them to the Israelis, therefore as good as giving them to the Americans-or even the other Warsaw Pact countries, had gone out to the West even before the design prototypes had entered full production. Aircraft specifications. Performance on both conventional and nuclear warheads of every description. Reliability figures for strategic missiles. Inside squabbling in the Defense Ministry, and now, entering the time when Ustinov had become a full voting member of the Politburo, political disputes at the highest level. Most damaging of all, Filitov had given the West everything he knew of Soviet strategy- and he knew all there was to know. As sounding board and confidant for Dmitri Ustinov, and in his capacity as a legendary combat soldier, he'd been the bureaucrat's eyepiece onto the world of actual war-fighting.
And so, Misha, what do you think of this ? Ustinov must have asked that same question a thousand times, Vatutin realized, but he'd never suspected
"What sort of man was Ustinov?" the Colonel of "Two" asked.
"Brilliant," Filitov said at once. "His administrative talents were unparalleled. His instincts for manufacturing