The Tristan Betrayal Read online

  “Silence, you fool!” Metcalfe roared. He lunged forward, reaching into the Gruppenführer’s tunic and pulling out the lewd postcards. He tossed them into the air. Then he sniffed loudly, his face next to the German’s. “Look at what this degenerate spends his time doing!” he snapped in German, addressing the guard. “And smell his breath—he is drunk.”

  Koller’s face turned crimson. “How dare you—”

  “Whether this is some sort of intraservice prank or simple sabotage, consider the source! A drunken degenerate who tries to delay the Reich’s work.” He pointed at Koller. “You, whoever you are and whatever your degenerate intentions, have no business interfering with security business of the utmost urgency! As our Führer says, the future belongs to the vigilant.” He shook his head in disgust. “Gott im Himmel! You disgrace us all.”

  With that, Metcalfe turned on his heel and strode away, in the direction of the hangar he had just seen Scoop enter. But his ears remained attuned to shouts, running footsteps, any signs that his ruse had failed. He could hear Johannes Koller still arguing with the guard, his voice rising until he sounded apoplectic with rage. Metcalfe’s counterattack had worked, but it had probably done no more than buy him a minute or two.

  That was better than nothing. The difference between success and failure might be as slim as a few seconds.

  Metcalfe ran full out. The hangar straight ahead of him was a large barrel-shaped structure built of prestressed, reinforced concrete. In the early days it had been used as a hangar for dirigibles. Now it held the Junkers Ju-52/3m on which the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs had been scheduled to depart this very moment.

  But El Ministro was unavoidably detained, his pilot, Metcalfe now saw, lying slumped on the ground against the concrete wall of the hangar, a black-haired man in a leather jacket. What had Scoop done to the man? Had he killed him? Scoop was a pilot, not an operative, but if it was necessary to take a life, he would do so.

  As Metcalfe approached, he heard the plane’s three powerful engines roar to life. The ugly slab-sided craft jolted ahead, rolling forward. Scoop was in the cockpit, visible through the Plexiglas canopy, waving wildly at him to get in. Scoop was shouting as well, though the engine drone made his words inaudible.

  The plane was some sixty feet long, almost twenty feet high. On its corrugated light-alloy metal skin were painted the words IBERIA—LINEAS AEREAS ESPANOLAS. This was a German-manufactured craft in the service of the Spanish national airline, probably left over from the Spanish Civil War.

  Madness! Scoop expected him to leap into a moving plane. There was no choice; Metcalfe could see several guards running toward him, brandishing their weapons. Dodging the giant propeller blades, he raced past the low, cantilevered wing and grabbed hold of the cabin hatch door, which had been left open. No ramp was in place, nor was one necessary. He pulled himself up, hoisted himself into the cabin as the plane accelerated on the tarmac, pulled the hatch closed behind him, and bolted it.

  He could hear the explosion of bullets pitting the plane’s duralumin skin. The craft was lightly armored, built to withstand ordinary gunfire, though nothing much heavier. The engines revved, whined. Through the small Plexiglas window he could see the runway fly by. The interior of the cabin was equipped with a dozen or so seats and was, by the standards of most Junkers planes, almost luxurious. Metcalfe ran forward, but a sudden lurch threw him to the cabin floor. Crawling the rest of the way, he finally made it to the cockpit.

  “Strap in!” Scoop shouted as Metcalfe leaped into the copilot’s seat. Another volley of gunfire strafed the nose nacelle. Fortunately, the cockpit sat high, canted upward, out of the line of fire. Through the Plexiglas, he could see the source of the barrage: three or four MPs firing off their machine guns from a hundred feet away.

  Suddenly Metcalfe realized that they were headed directly toward the guards. Scoop seemed to be aiming for them! As the plane hurtled forward, the men scattered, diving to the ground on either side, unwilling to risk their lives in a foolhardy attempt to stop fifteen thousand pounds of runaway plane.

  As Metcalfe strapped in, he could hear Scoop speaking into the radio, but he couldn’t make out the words. The engine drone grew high-pitched as the plane accelerated, the throttle pushed full open. Scoop pulled back on the controls to set full flaps and achieve a climbing angle. There was another spatter of gunfire against the fuselage, somewhere to the rear, and the plane lifted off.

  The engine noise had abated somewhat. “Jesus Christ almighty, Metcalfe,” Scoop said. “What the hell did you get me into?”

  “You did it, Scoop.”

  “Barely.”

  “But you did it. Are we cleared for takeoff, by the way?”

  Scoop shrugged. “Our flight path is cleared, but I had to make a premature departure. We should be okay for a while.”

  “A while?”

  “I don’t think Luftwaffe air traffic control is going to order us shot down. Too much uncertainty. A Spanish plane cleared to take off, the reports will be conflicting—”

  “You don’t think?”

  “Like it or not, Metcalfe, we’re in the middle of a war. Fortunately, we’ve got civilian markings, so my buddies in the RAF won’t be shooting us down. It’s the damned Nazis I worry about. We’re flying a goddamned stolen plane through Nazi-controlled airspace. You know what that could mean.”

  Metcalfe chose to ignore the warning; after all, what could he do about it at this point? All they could do was hope for the best and count on Scoop’s extraordinary skill. “You’ve flown one of these before?”

  “Oh, sure. ‘Tante Ju.’ The corrugated coffin. No, actually, I haven’t, but close enough.”

  “Jesus,” Metcalfe groaned. “How far can this thing take us?”

  Scoop was silent for a minute. They were still climbing. “Eight hundred miles or so, with the auxiliary fuel tanks.”

  “We’re going to just make it to Silesia.”

  “Barely.”

  “Even then, assuming we get there safely and we’re able to refuel, it’s going to be dicey.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s another eight hundred miles or so. It’s going to be close.”

  “Eight hundred miles to where? I thought Silesia was the final destination.”

  “No,” said Metcalfe. “I have a date. With an old girlfriend.”

  “Have you gone barmy on me, Metcalfe?”

  “No. You’re taking us to Moscow.”

  PART TWO

  Moscow, August 1991

  Ambassador Stephen Metcalfe hung up the phone, shaken.

  It was after midnight, Moscow time. He sat in a secure room on the second floor of Spaso House, the ornate putty-yellow mansion a mile west of the Kremlin that served as the residence of the American ambassador to Moscow. This had been Metcalfe’s home for four years in the 1960s; he knew it well. The current ambassador, a friend of Metcalfe’s, was pleased to give the illustrious Stephen Metcalfe the use of the sterile telephone line.

  The President’s national security adviser had just provided him with the latest signals intelligence on the growing crisis in Moscow, and it looked ominous.

  Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been on vacation with his family at the seaside presidential villa in the Crimea, was being held hostage. The conspirators—including the chairman of the KGB, the Defense Minister, the chief of the Politburo, the Prime Minister, and even Gorbachev’s own chief of staff—had declared a state of emergency. They had announced, falsely, that Gorbachev had fallen ill and was unable to govern. They had ordered 250,000 pairs of handcuffs from a factory in Pskov and had had 300,000 arrest forms printed. They had cleared two entire floors of Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison to incarcerate their enemies.

  The ZIL limousine was waiting for him in front of Spaso House. Metcalfe got in next to his old friend the three-star general. The Russian who had used the code name “Kurwenal” was, Metcalfe saw, dressed in civilian attire. The man
nodded at the driver, and the car immediately sped through the tank-choked streets.

  The general spoke without preamble, the tension in his voice evident. “Gorbachev has no way to communicate with the outside world. All of his telephone lines have been cut, even the special commander-in-chief line.”

  “There’s worse,” said Metcalfe. “I’ve just learned that the conspirators now have control of the nuclear football.”

  The general closed his eyes. The briefcase that held the top-secret Soviet nuclear codes would enable the junta to launch Russia’s entire arsenal of nuclear weapons if and when they so chose. The thought of such power in the hands of madmen was staggering.

  “Is Gorbachev alive?”

  “Apparently so,” replied Metcalfe.

  “The coup plotters want change,” the general said. “Well, they will get change. Just not the change they imagine. If . . .”

  Metcalfe waited. Then he asked, “If what?”

  “If the Dirizhor will intervene. He is the only one who can stop this insanity.”

  “They’ll listen to him?”

  “More than that. As the chief of my country’s entire military-industrial complex, the Dirizhor, as he’s called, holds vast power in his hands.”

  Metcalfe settled back in his seat. “It’s strange, you know,” he said. “You and I seem to speak to each other only at times of extraordinary crises. When the world is at the precipice of nuclear war. The Berlin Wall crisis, the Cuban Missile crisis—”

  “Was I not right that Khrushchev would never fire his missiles?”

  “You’ve never compromised the interests of your own country, and neither have I. I suppose we’ve both acted as . . . as . . .”

  “As circuit breakers, I’ve always thought. We’ve been there to ensure the house doesn’t burn down.”

  “But we’re old, both of us. We are respected because of our reputations, our age, our alleged ‘wisdom’—though I always say that wisdom is what comes from making a shitload of mistakes.”

  “And learning from them,” the general added.

  “Perhaps. Still, I’m superannuated. I’m just about irrelevant in Washington. If it weren’t for my money, I doubt I’d still get invitations to the White House.”

  “The Dirizhor will not consider you irrelevant or superannuated.”

  “I belong to the past. I’m history.”

  “In Russia the past never remains the past, and history is never just history.”

  But before Metcalfe could reply, the limousine screeched to a halt. In front of them was a roadblock: traffic cones, road flares, a line of uniformed soldiers.

  “Alpha Group,” said the general.

  “Order them to stand down,” said Metcalfe. “You’re their superior officer.”

  “They’re not army. They’re KGB. The elite commando group that was used in Afghanistan, in Lithuania.” He added regretfully, “And now here in Moscow.”

  The men surrounded the limousine, submachine guns pointed. “Step out of the car,” ordered the squadron leader. “You—driver. You two old men in the back. Now!”

  “Dear God,” breathed the general. “These are men with orders to kill.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Moscow, November 1940

  Moscow had changed dramatically since the last time Metcalfe had been there, and yet it was very much the same place. It was a city of shabbiness and grandeur, desperation and pride. Everywhere he went, from the lobby of the Metropole Hotel to Kuznetsky Most, there was the stench of makhorka, the cheap Russian tobacco, a smell he’d always associated with Russia. Too, there was the foul, rancid smell of wet sheepskin, another Moscow odor he recognized.

  So much was the same, yet so much had changed. The old one- and two-story buildings had been demolished, replaced by grandiose skyscrapers built according to Stalin’s personal taste, in the wedding-cake style of architecture they were calling Stalinist Gothic. Everywhere was frantic construction, excavation. Moscow was transforming itself into the center of a totalitarian empire.

  There were no more horse-drawn carriages. The cobblestone streets had been widened and graded and asphalted over, as Moscow had made itself over for the age of the automobile. Not that there were all that many cars on the streets—a few battered old Renaults, but mostly Emkas, the Russian nickname for the GAZ M-1, their knockoff of the 1933 Ford. The dull brown streetcars still screeched noisily on their tracks, and Muscovites still clung to them, hanging out of the open doors, but the trams were no longer as crowded as they used to be when Metcalfe had last visited. There were other ways to get around Moscow now, including the new Metro that had been built in the last few years.

  The air was sootier than ever: smoke now belched from factories and trains and automobiles. The old, steep Tverskaya Street, that grand thoroughfare, had been renamed Gorky Street, for the writer who had championed the Revolution. Most of the small shops had been replaced by huge government stores—stores that were empty, shelves bare, despite their fancy window dressing. Food was scarce, but propaganda was plentiful. Everywhere Metcalfe walked there seemed to be giant portraits of Stalin, or Stalin and Lenin together. Buildings were festooned with immense red banners that proclaimed: “We will overfulfill the quotas of the Five Year Plan!” and “Communism = Soviet Power + Electrification of the Whole Country!”

  Still, beneath the strange Communist trappings the eternal, ancient Moscow remained—the golden onion domes of the old Russian Orthodox churches glinting in the sun, the dazzling colors of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, the workers in their tattered outfits of quilted cotton wadding, peasants in bulky coats and babushkas on their heads, hurrying along the streets, carrying avoskas, string bags, or dragging homemade wooden suitcases.

  In their faces, though, was something new, a harrowing fear even deeper, more profound, than Metcalfe had seen six years earlier: a paranoia, a thick and enveloping terror that seemed to have settled over the Russians like a blanket of fog. That was the most awful transformation of all. The great terror, the purges of the 1930s that had begun only after Metcalfe had last left Moscow, had etched itself onto every face, from the lowliest peasant to the highest commissar.

  Metcalfe had seen it in his meeting today at the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade—a meeting he thought would never be over, but that was necessary for the charade, the pretext for his being in Moscow at all. Certain members of the delegation should have been familiar to him from the old days, but they had changed almost beyond recognition. The jolly, laughing Litvikov had become a beetle-browed, haunted figure. His aides, who in earlier times would have been expansive and gracious in the presence of this great American capitalist, were now impassive and remote. They regarded him, Metcalfe thought, with both envy and fear. He was royalty, yes, but he was also diseased, contagious: if they got too close to him, they could be tainted in the eyes of their superiors. At any moment they could be charged with espionage, with collaborating with a capitalist agent; they could be arrested, executed. People were shot for far less.

  Recalling the meeting now, Metcalfe shook his head. Sitting in that overheated reception room, around a table covered with green felt, he’d had to go through an elaborate dance of hints and promises without committing to anything. He had hinted at his family’s political connections, dropping names like Franklin Roosevelt, names of the President’s trusted aides, of powerful senators. He had confided that the President, despite his public posture of criticism of Russia, actually wanted to increase trade with the Soviet Union, and he could see their ears prick up. It was all smoke and mirrors, but it seemed to have worked.

  Now, as he walked across Teatralnaya Square, he could see the gleaming classical facade of the Bolshoi Theater, with its eight-columned portico and, atop its pediment, the four bronze horses of Apollo’s chariot. Metcalfe found his pulse quickening.

  He passed a militsiyoner, a street policeman, who eyed him warily, ogling Metcalfe’s garb: his heavy black cashmere coat, his finely sewn le
ather gloves. It was the attire, after all, of the scion of Metcalfe Industries.

  Hide in plain sight, Corky had often admonished him. Naked is the best disguise.

  To which his old friend Derek Compton-Jones, overhearing, had once cracked, “Stephen’s got the naked part down, all right. He thinks a ‘one-time pad’ is where you go for a one-night stand.”

  Remembering, Metcalfe felt a stab of grief. His friends in the Paris station were all dead now. Good, brave men murdered in the line of duty, but how? And why?

  Now he thought of an old Russian proverb—there were dozens, hundreds of them that he’d heard in the time he’d spent here—that said: “Dwell on the past, and you’ll lose an eye; forget the past, and you’ll lose both eyes.”

  He would not forget the past. No, he couldn’t forget the past. Here, in Moscow, he was surrounded by it, he was returning to it; and the past that he was returning to was a dancer named Svetlana.

  Outside the theater was a crowd of people waiting to enter. Metcalfe had no ticket to this evening’s sold-out performance of The Red Poppy, but there were always ways. In Moscow, hard currency—the American dollar, the British pound, the French franc—could buy almost anything. There would always be Muscovites desperate for valuta, as they called hard currency, which could be used to buy food in the special stores intended only for foreigners. Desperate enough that they would even peddle their highly sought-after tickets to the Bolshoi. Desperation: he could always count on that here in Moscow.

  The crowd was better-dressed, in general, than the people he passed on the street, and no surprise about that. Tickets to the Bolshoi could only be gotten through blat, the Soviet Russian word for pull, connections. You had to know someone, be someone important, be a member of the Party—or be a foreigner. There were lots of military uniforms in this crowd, red epaulets on the uniforms of officers. The epaulets were a new thing, Metcalfe reflected. Stalin had introduced them recently as a way to restore morale in the Red Army, which had been traumatized by the purges of 1938, when so many of the military leaders had been executed, charged with being traitors in collusion with Nazi Germany.