Snow Wolf (12 page)
"Then we're in your hands, it
seems."
The second man came over and nodded to
Massey and Saarinen. Massey introduced them and the young man said to Massey,
"Something tells me I should have taken my chances with a war crimes
trial."
"Too late now. OK, let's run through
a final check. Paper belongings, money. On the table."
The Ukrainians emptied out their pockets
on the table as Massey sifted through their belongings. "Everything looks
in order. Once you get to Moscow and get yourselves organized you know what to
do."
Both men nodded.
"That's it, then. Good luck to both
of you." The red-haired Ukrainian grunted and said to Saarinen, "If
we get to Moscow. Whenever you're ready, my little crippled friend."
Saarinen glared at the man and went to
move toward him, but Massey gripped the Finn's shoulder as the Ukrainian turned
dismissively and he and his companion walked toward the aircraft, parachutes
over their shoulders, both of them laughing.
"Maybe I should drop them in the
wrong zone, just for the fun of it, and let the KGB do the work for me."
"Don't worry, the life expectancy of
those two isn't long. If they do make it to Moscow, they'll be lucky. You ought
to know-most of the agents we send in get caught in the first forty-eight
hours, but it's still a chance that's better than a rope or a firing
squad."
"And I have to say some of the bastards
you use deserve it, Jake. Right, I suppose I'd better get moving."
As Saarinen picked up a parachute and
went to move toward the stairs up to the DC-3, a jeep pulled up outside the
hangar and a young man in civilian clothes climbed out and went over to Massey.
"Message for you, sir."
He handed across a telegram and Massey
tore it open, read the contents, then said to the man, "Carry on,
Lieutenant. There's no reply needed."
The man climbed back into the jeep and
drove off into heavy rain as Saarinen came over.
"Bad news? Don't tell me, the drop's
canceled because of the weather?"
He grinned. "Never mind that I've
flown in much worse without a copilot, like tonight. With a bit of luck I might
just make it to a nightclub in Munich, and those two bastards on board can live
on their nerves for another night." Massey said, "Afraid not. And it
depends on what you mean by bad news. I've been recalled to Washington as soon
as I've finished this week's parachute drops."
" Lucky for you." Saarinen
smiled. "Me, I'm taking a rest after this one, Jake. Time to throttle back
and rest my wings. Some of these former SS scum you're using are starting to
get on my nerves."
Saarinen went up the metal stairs of the
aircraft and at the top he hauled in the steps.
"Wish me luck."
"Break a leg."
It was almost nine when Jake Massey drove
down to the lake and lit a cigarette as he stared out at the choppy water in
the drizzling rain. He wondered about the signal from Washington and why they
wanted him home.
As he switched off the engine he heard
the faint blast of a fog-horn out on the water, glanced up and saw the distant
lights of a boat moving in the cold darkness near the far shore.
That sound always reminded him, and for a
moment he sat there and closed his eyes.
It was a long ago winter's evening like
this when he had first seen the lights of America as a child.
He was only seven years of age but Jakob
Masensky still remembered the body smells and the babble of strange voices on
Ellis Island.
Ukrainians, Russians, mixed with Irish
and Italians and Spanish and Germans. All hoping to start a new life in the
promise of the New World.
He had arrived with his parents from
Russia in 1919, two years after the Bolshevik Revolution.
In St. Petersburg, where his father's family
had emigrated from Poland two generations before, Stanistas Masensky had been
employed by the royal household. Jakob Masensky still had a sharp memory of
being taken for winter walks in the grounds of the magnificent gilded palaces
of Catherine the Great. Stanislas Masensky was an intelligent man, a reader and
chess player who, were it not for the accident of being born into an
impoverished family, might have become a lawyer or a doctor and not the humble
master carpenter that he was.
And Stanislas Masensky also had a secret
which, were it known to his employers, would have caused his instant dismissal.
He was an ardent Menshevik supporter who
in his heart despised the nobility and everything it stood for. He believed
that Russia's future lay in democracy and freedom and that change was coming
whether the Tsar wanted it or not, so when the Reds took St. Petersburg he was
not a pleased man.
"Believe me, Jakob," his father
was fond of saying. "We will pay the price of this Red folly. We need a
new Russia, but not that kind of new Russia."
And no one had been more surprised by the
Reds' revolution than Stanislas Masensky. It had come like a whirlwind almost
out of nowhere, for the Mensheviks had long been the dominant force for change
in Russia. And Lenin's Bolsheviks knew this, and that any threat to their
promised revolution would have to be crushed mercilessly.
The Reds had come one day; three men with
rifles.
They had marched Stanislas away at the
point of their bayonets. His pregnant wife and child didn't see him until his
release three days later. He had been beaten almost to a pulp and his arms had
been broken. He had been lucky not to get a bullet in the neck but that might
come soon, and Stanislas knew it.
So he and his wife had packed their
belongings and with a horse and cart donated by a relative had set off with
their son for Estonia. What little money Jakob's parents had begged and
borrowed went on tickets on a Swedish schooner bound from Tallinn to New York.
It was a difficult winter crossing, made
all the harsher because of savage easterly winds. The schooner was buffeted and
tossed in twenty-foot swells and in the holds the immigrants suffered the
worst. On the fifth day Nadia Masensky went into premature labor.
Stanislas Masensky lost not only a child
but a young wife, and when the bodies were buried at sea young Jakob remembered
the desolate look on his father's face. The man had loved his young wife
deeply, and after her loss he was never the same. A friend of his father's had
once told Jakob that the loss of a beautiful young wife was something a man
never really got over, and he believed it, watching his father retreat into
himself year after year.
Until the Depression came, life had been
reasonably good in America for Stanislas and his young son. He had settled in
the area of Brooklyn called Brighton Beach, known as Little Russia because of
its wave of Russian immigrants who had fled the brutality of the Tsar, Lenin,
and Stalin after him, and while Stanislas went out to work on the building sites
he found an old babushka to take care of his son.
That first day on Ellis Island, like so
many thousands of other immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia, Stanislas
Masensky had his name changed to an Anglicized version, Massey.
This was partly because of the
immigration clerk's impatience and inability to understand or spell the Polish
name, and also because it somehow affirmed Stanilas's belief in a fresh start
in life and satisfied an unconscious wish to erase his troubled past.
An only child, young Jakob Massey proved
to be an ardent pupil at school, but what appealed to him most was to sit at
his father's feet and listen to stories of his Russian homeland. About the
assassination of the Tsar Alexander and the countless attempts to establish
democracy by students and workers put down mercilessly by a succession of
Tsars, long before the revolution was even a gleam in the communists' eyes.
And later he was to learn from the
immigrant newspapers how the Reds had moved whole villages to Siberia, killed
anyone who got in the way of their lust for power; how millions of small
peasant farmers called kulaks had been savagely annihilated because they dared
to speak out against Joseph Stalin's agrarian reforms. Whole families brutally
wiped out, villages destroyed or deported, millions shot because of one man's
lust for power.
When the Depression deepened and
Stanislas couldn't find work, in his despair he never blamed America, but the
Reds for forcing him to flee his homeland. When it became harder for him to
support his son and their lodgings became squalid tenements, he finally moved
to a hostel where he and the boy had to line up for soup from a charity
kitchen.
For young Jakob, the nadir came one
winter's afternoon at the age of sixteen.
He had walked home from school one day to
see his once proud father standing on a street corner with a placard on which
he had scrawled: "I am good honest carpenter. Please give me job."
To Jakob it was heartrending to see the
parent he loved reduced to such humiliation. It was the final straw. That day
he made up his mind that he was going to be rich and his father was never going
to have to beg for work.
But Stanislas was to die on his
forty-fifth birthday, a broken and disillusioned man.
Jakob himself never became rich. And it
took him longer than he thought to make something of himself. He found a
succession of menial jobs just to keep food in his belly. He earned a degree in
languages at night school followed by a year at Yale. All paid for with his own
sweat. Then in 1939, much to the surprise of his fellow students, he joined the
Army as an officer cadet.
After Pearl Harbor there had been rapid
promotion for those who sought it but Massey was more interested in action.
Within six months of America entering the war he was based in Switzerland with
Allen Dulles's OSS, organizing reconnaissance missions deep into
German-occupied territory.
After the war, America soon discovered
her former Russian ally to be an enemy.
The wartime American Intelligence had
little or no knowledge of the KGB and knew still less what went on behind
Soviet borders. In a frenzy to gather intelligence information, growing numbers
of immigrant Russians, Poles, young men with a knowledge of Soviet languages an
customs-were recruited from the cities and prisoner-of-war camps all over
Europe, and the Americans picked their brightest and best officers to train and
oversee them.
It seemed a job Massey was curiously
fitted to, and so after the war he had remained in Europe, working out of
Munich and dispatching agents onto Soviet soil on long-term reconnaissance
missions, hoping they could send back detailed information on the alarming
postwar Soviet military buildup of the patriots, freebooters and renegades,
some of them restless men still thirsting for action after a war that had not
provided them with enough.
Former SS with Russian-language skills who
were destined to face long terms in prison or, worse, death for war crimes,
like the two men being dropped tonight, risked nothing by parachuting into
KGB-controlled territory. If they performed their tasks and somehow made it
back over the border they were free men with a new identity and a clean
slate-at best they prolonged their life; at worst, they forfeited it in the
gamble.
Jake Massey ran the Munich station with
ruthless efficiency, relative success, and nothing short of hatred for the
Soviets, and with an intimate knowledge of their wiles. In Washington, it was
acknowledged he was among the best.
Massey heard another distant fog-horn
blast the air somewhere out in the drizzling darkness of the lake and looked
up.
There was another thing Jake Massey was
unaware of that cold January evening as he looked out at the icy waters.
At that moment, less than two thousand
miles away in Moscow, the wheels were already turning in a plot that was to
consume the next six Weeks of his life and bring the world to the brink of war.
Massey took one last look out at the dark
shore, then pulled up his collar against the cold and started the jeep. There
was just time to write his monthly report to CIA Headquarters in Washington
before bed.
Moscow.
January 13th It was almost 2 A.m. as the
Emka sedan and the two Zil trucks trundled out through the massive black gates
at the rear of KGB Headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square.
As the vehicles headed south toward the
Moscow River, the plain-clothes officer seated in the front passenger seat of
the car removed an old silver case from his pocket, flicked it open and
selected a cigarette.
Major Yuri Lukin of the KGB 2nd
Directorate knew that his task that morning wasn't going to be a pleasant one,
and as he sat back in his seat and lit his cigarette he sighed deeply.
He was thirty-two, of medium build, a
handsome man with dark hair and a calm, pleasant face. He wore a heavy black
overcoat and a gray civilian suit underneath. His left hand from the forearm
down was missing, and in its place was an artificial limb, sheathed in a black
leather glove.
As Lukin drew on his cigarette he stared
out beyond the windshield.
