Nature of the Game (26 page)

They reined to stop outside the guards' perimeter. Horses pawed the grounds, snorted vapor clouds. No man spoke.

With one eye on the horsemen, Alexi shook Jud's hand.

One Kurd led a riderless horse. Jud tied his locked duffel bag behind the empty saddle, mounted the animal.

The leader of the Kurds leered at Alexi. The Kurd spat on the ground. He shouted a command and the horsemen galloped back from whence they'd come. With Jud in their midst.

They rode into the mountains, single file over trails visible only to the Kurds. Night fell. Jud feared that his horse would slip and send them tumbling down a rocky slope to certain death. They made camp at midnight, gave Jud a canteen of cold tea and a dry place to sleep. They were back in the saddle before dawn. Daybreak put them at the snow line in a jumble of crowded peaks. The wind was brittle, and breathing was difficult.

Just before noon, Jud spotted a sentry on a crag above the trail. Ten minutes later, he and the man who'd taken charge of his life road into a cluster of fifty small tents. Children ran to their mothers. The men in the camp hefted their guns.

The leader of Jud's band rode toward a tent where a scarred man in his early fifties waited, his sons by his side. The Kurds in the camp circled around the arrivals.

Jud's guide dismounted; Jud followed suit. The guide grunted and jerked his head toward Jud. Spit on Jud's feet.

Jud knocked the man to the ground.

Half a dozen rifle bolts shot home. The crowd murmured.

The scarred man roared with laughter.

“You American! Yes! You American. American only do that! No Iranian. No Savak. Yes!”

He stepped over his unconscious comrade, clapped Jud on the shoulders, and shook his hand.

“I Dara Ahmedi. Learn good English from Brits.” Dara spat. “Brits no good. America, very, very good.”

He took Jud to his tent, fed him goats' eyes stewed with vegetables and herbs Jud didn't recognize.

During the next nine days, Jud inoculated the children against smallpox with his Special Forces medical kit. In front of the camp's hierarchy, he solemnly gave Dara twenty-five ounces of gold and a new Colt .45 with two extra clips. He helped repair old rifles.

The women and children were fascinated by the warrior-doctor from fabled America. They tried to teach Jud Kurdish songs. He tried to teach them the Beatles, “She Loves You,” but the only part the children mastered was the “yeah yeah yeah” chorus. With the women clapping encouragement, Dara taught Jud the dance of Kurdish men. Jud's katas excited the young men, and he taught them commando tricks.

“Teach me American poetry,” said Dara.

“Forgive me,” said Jud, “but I know too few poems.”

“What have you done with your life?” asked the Kurd. Dara recited Kurdish and Moslem classics for Jud. He also tried to educate his guest on the politics of the world.

“You tell His Excellency President Nixon, Shah very bad man,” said Dara. “Not trust.”

“I'll tell my people,” promised Jud.

They broke camp on the tenth day. As Jud and Dara settled on their horses, the Kurd said, “Not for gold we do this. America, Kurdistan: one day they shall rule injustice together.”

The caravan set out, winding their way northeast.

Dara made camps at irregular intervals, some days journeying only a few miles, other days pushing his band to the limits of the children and old people. Scouts ranged ahead of the band, and their flanks and rear were always covered.

“The mountains are not for the foolish,” said Dara.

All the while, Jud monitored the day-date watch given him before he joined the DESERT LAKE troops.

One day, when Dara gave no indication that camp would be broken so the band could move on, Jud pressed him on their pact.

“How much farther?” asked Jud.

Dara spit in the dust at his feet. And laughed.

They were already in the Soviet Union. The mountains suddenly grew eyes.

“The road,” said Jud. “How far?”

“Half days' ride. Here, no helicopters come.”

“I must go there,” said Jud. “Day after tomorrow. Thursday. Or wait nine more days.”

“
Ser chava
,” said Dara: “On your eyes.” A solemn ritual phrase used for greetings and farewells. Or oaths.

Shortly after midnight on Wednesday, Jud, Dara, and thirty of the strongest and best-armed men bid their farewells, rode away. The rest of the band melted back across the border into Iran.

Dara's scouts had forgotten more ways through the mountains than modern mapmakers with their satellite photos knew. By dawn, the Kurds huddled along the walls of a gorge leading down from the mountains to a plateau. Below them, the rising sun revealed a dirt road snaking into the heart of Mother Russia.

Even with binoculars, Jud saw no life on the plateau or in the surrounding mountains. He waited until after noon.

A Kurd shaved Jud. From his duffel bag came the uniform of a lieutenant in the Glavnoye Razedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. Jud strapped on a Tokarev pistol, checked his watch, embraced Dara …

And walked out of the mountains alone.

When he reached the road, Jud sat down. An hour later, he saw the dust of the approaching staff car. He flagged it down.

The driver was alone. In the uniform of a GRU lieutenant. He got out of the car.

“
Shto vi dielete, zdez?
” What are you doing here?

Jud had studied Farsi for sixteen weeks at the U.S. Army's defense language school—in the mornings. Afternoons, he memorized as many Russian phrases as they could cram into him.

“
Maya mashina nye moshet idyot. Mne ravitza schto vi zdez
.” My vehicle won't work. I'm glad you're here.

The Soviet lieutenant was about Jud's age, a draftee from Georgia. Jud limped around the front of the car.

“
Gdey vasha mashina?
” Where is your vehicle?

“
O menya yest papya
.” Here are my papers, said Jud, reaching inside his overcoat.

The Russian held out his hand for the promised papers. Jud grabbed it, kicked him in the groin, then broke his neck.

Nothing stirred on the plateau.

Jud compared his ID with the dead officer's: the formats matched. Jud hid the body between two boulders, climbed behind the wheel of the staff car, drove away.

The odometer showed he went 42.4 kilometers, through winding hills, up the slope of a mountain photographed by American spy satellites. As he rounded a roller-coaster curve, he saw the prefabricated dome, the spinning radar dish, three wall-sized concave receptor boards mounted on thirty-foot towers, four long-range antennae:

GRU SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) Site 423, a Soviet ear sucking up electronic signals from all over the Middle East.

American intelligence knew a lot about Site 423. Such knowledge came from espionage and mirror logic: a Soviet GRU SIGINT post would logically resemble an American NSA SIGINT post.

American spooks knew that 423 was a
collection
and not an
analysis
site, that it was staffed by eight overworked technicians, three janitor-cooks, two clerks, a master sergeant, a lieutenant who seconded the commanding officer/captain, and another lieutenant who wore a GRU uniform but who actually served the Third Directorate of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the KGB, the politically superior civilian intelligence agency. The extra lieutenant made sure none of the Soviet personnel at Site 423 betrayed the interests of the KGB—or the State.

In addition to these seventeen men, six guards were assigned to the Site, for a total of twenty-three Soviet soldiers. SIGINT is a twenty-four-hour job, so at least a third of the personnel were always asleep. If Site 423 needed help, a post of the KGB's crack Border Guards was sixty-three kilometers away. But nothing ever happened at Site 423.

When Jud topped the road's last roller-coaster hill, he saw a dozen troop trucks and six jeeps parked inside the chain link fence. Outside the fence, six squads of men stood in ranks before three sergeants, who were leading them in a karate drill.

Jud slowed his car, blinked, felt his world collapse.

The almost one hundred extra Soviet soldiers were not supposed to be there.

Some of the exercising soldiers showed their toughness by wearing only T-shirts against the cold. Blue-and-white-striped T-shirts, of the kind worn only by Spetsnaz, the elite Soviet troops that are the counterpart to America's Special Forces.

A dozen Spetsnaz faces saw Jud's car. If he turned around, they'd suspect. They'd chase. Radio for helicopters.

“
Shit!
” whispered Jud. He drove forward.

The GRU guard at the gate checked Jud's ID, waved him to a parking spot. A camp guard escorted Jud to the command center. He carried the mailbag from Jud's car, let Jud carry the dead lieutenant's briefcase. The guard whispered a warning, words Jud didn't understand, but a tone he knew to answer with a nod.

Inside the command center, a colonel wearing paratrooper wings had the Site's captain, two lieutenants, and sergeant major quivering at attention as he screamed at them. Three technicians wearing earphones sat in front of the sophisticated console deck of the SIGINT equipment; their faces were pale, their hands trembled.

Jud understood none of the colonel's rapid-fire Russian.

The colonel whirled. Jud saluted, pulled the proper papers from the dead man's briefcase. “
O menya yest papya!
”

The colonel glanced at the paperwork, threw it to the captain. The Spetsnaz officer yelled at Jud for two minutes—and ended his harangue with the unmistakable lilt of a question.

That Jud didn't understand; that he couldn't answer.

The silence between them grew. Electric space heaters labored to heat this room. Sweat ran down Jud's cheeks. He wanted to vomit; faint. The colonel leaned so close Jud could smell his sour-cabbage-and-tea breath.

“
Da?
” screamed the colonel.

“
Da tavarish!
” Yes comrade! Jud yelled back.

“Bah!” The colonel jerked his thumb toward the closed door of the inner office.

And Jud scurried inside, closed the door. He was alone.

His mission was a Skorzeny operation, nicknamed after the Nazi commando who turned deception and audacity into an art form.

The lieutenant Jud had killed on the road was one of many anonymous junior officers dispatched each week from the Soviet bureaucracy. The officer's job was to see that the daily reports of Site 423 had been filled out and to certify them with a rubber stamp. He delivered and picked up camp mail. The Americans knew that the rubber-stamping officer arrived at 423 on Thursday afternoons.

Jud's mission was to replace the lieutenant, utilize the predictable conversation patterns he'd memorized to slide into the rhythm of a routine-numbed base, gain entry to the command center office—and use the camera sewn into his overcoat to photograph the technical manuals stored there. The manuals would give U.S. scientists data on what the Soviet ears could hear, thus pointing the way to countermeasures that might give the Americans a giant lead in the perpetual seesaw intelligence race. Anything else Jud could acquire would be icing on an already sweet cake.

Under the optimum mission scenario, Jud's espionage would go undetected; as he made his escape, he would fake a car accident on the mountain roads, leaving the lieutenant's body in the car. The best intelligence is what your enemy doesn't know you know.

Under the worse-case mission scenario, Jud would be discovered as an impostor while at Site 423. But with only a handful of non-combat-trained technicians opposing him, the mission planners projected Jud's chance of success and escape at 60–40.

No scenario accounted for the presence at Site 423 of a hundred of the Soviet Union's toughest and craftiest soldiers.

The office matched the sketches drawn for the CIA two years earlier by a Soviet Army deserter they'd sucked up in Finland: a small room crammed with files and shelves. Stacks of reports sat on the desk, awaiting the stamp in the briefcase Jud carried. Against one wall was a cement-encased, dull-gray safe.

Yugoslavian
, thought Jud, secured with the most exotic lock available to the GRU: a standard American Yale.

The manuals were on a shelf, three thick volumes. He had enough film sewn into the lining of his overcoat, but that was a two- to three-hour job. The Site personnel were paranoid, fearful that one of the weekly rubber-stamp lieutenants might be a KGB spy sent to check on them. They avoided the lieutenants. Normally, Jud would have had plenty of time to photograph the manuals, search the office, and stamp the reports before anyone checked on him.

Today's clock is almost out
, thought Jud.

He stuffed the manuals in the briefcase.

Lockpicks hidden in his tunic let him open the safe in eleven minutes. He stole a highly prized onetime encrypting electronic key shaped like a garage-door opener, files stamped
TOP> SECRET
.

He cracked the office door. The only sounds coming through the opening were the whir and click of computers; static being shifted by electronic ears. He unsnapped his holster.

Jud stepped into the control room. The three technicians and the sergeant stared at him. Jud held his finger to his lips, cocked his head toward the outer door.

Puzzled, but recognizing a coconspirator and an officer, the sergeant eased the outer door open; looked out; nodded to Jud.

He left them with a salute.

Slow
, he told himself.
Easy. Walk to the car as if Lenin and Stalin and all the other gods have sent you there
.

All around him in the evening light, Spetsnaz troops prepared their vehicles, checked their weapons. A training mission? A cross-border operation? Didn't matter.

Forty-seven paces to the car. Fifty slow-driving seconds to the closed gate.