Without remorse - Tom Clancy [96]
'I know little of your country - except professional matters, of course. Are there great regional differences? You come from Utah. What sort of place is it?'
'Zacharias, Robin G. Colonel -'
Grishanov raised his hands. 'Please, Colonel I know all that. I also know your place of birth in addition to the date. There is no base of your air force near Salt Lake City. All I know is from maps. I will probably never visit this part - any part of your country. In this Berkeley part of California, it is green, yes? I was told once they grow wine grapes there. But I know nothing of Utah. There is a large lake there, but it's called Salt Lake, yes? It's salty?'
'Yes, that's why -'
'How can it be salty? The ocean is a thousand kilometers away, with mountains in between, yes?' He didn't give the American time to reply. 'I know the Caspian Sea quite well. I was stationed at a base there once. It isn't salty. But this place is? How strange.' He stubbed out his cigarette.
The man's head jerked up a little. 'Not sure, I'm not a geologist. Something left over from another time, I suppose.'
'Perhaps so. There are mountains there, too, yes?'
'Wasatch Mountains,' Zacharias confirmed somewhat drunkenly.
One clever thing about the Vietnamese, Grishanov thought, the way they fed their prisoners, food a hog would eat only from necessity. He wondered if it were a deliberate and thought-out diet or something fortuitously resulting from mere barbarity. Political prisoners in the Gulag ate better, but the diet of these Americans lowered their resistance to disease, debilitated them to the point that the act of escape would be doomed by inadequate stamina. Rather like what the fascisti did to Soviet prisoners, distasteful or not, it was useful to Grishanov. Resistance, physical and mental, required energy, and you could watch these men lose their strength during the hours of interrogation, watch their courage wane as their physical needs drew more and more upon their supply of psychological resolve. He was learning how to do this. It was time-consuming, but it was a diverting process, learning to pick apart the brains of men not unlike himself.
'The skiing, is it good?'
Zacharias's eyes blinked, as though the question took him away to a different time and place. 'Yeah, it is.'
'That is something one will never do here, Colonel. I like cross-country skiing for exercise, and to get away from things. I had wooden skis, but in my last regiment my maintenance officer made me steel skis from aircraft parts.'
'Steel?'
'Stainless steel, heavier than aluminum but more flexible. I prefer it. From, a wing panel on our new interceptor, project E-266.'
'What's that?' Zacharias knew nothing of the new MiG-25.
'Your people now call it Foxbat. Very fast, designed to catch one of your B-70 bombers.'
'But we stopped that project,' Zacharias objected.
'Yes, I know that. But your project got me a wonderfully fast fighter to fly. When I return home, I will command the first regiment of them.'
'Fighter planes made of steel? Why?'
'It resists aerodynamic heating much better than aluminum,' Grishanov explained. 'And you can make good skis from discarded parts.' Zacharias was very confused now. 'So how well do you think we would do with my steel fighters and your aluminum bombers?'
'I guess that depends on -' Zacharias started to say, then stopped himself cold. His eyes looked across the table, first with confusion at what he'd almost said, then with resolve.
Too soon, Grishanov told himself with disappointment. He'd pushed a little too soon. This one had courage. Enough to take his Wild Weasel 'downtown,' the phrase the Americans used, over eighty times. Enough to resist for a long time. But Grishanov had plenty of time.
CHAPTER 12
Outfitters
63 VW, LOW MLGE, RAD, HTR . . .
Kelly dropped a dime in the pay phone and called the number. It was a blazing hot Saturday, temperature and humidity in a neck-and-neck race for triple digits while Kelly fumed at his own stupidity.