To Free a Spy Read online

  He loosened the horses’ saddles as they drank from the stream. The late afternoon sun poised over the water upstream found its way through the trees and splotched the landscape. Warfield climbed onto a rock the size of a car to absorb it all.

  He’d become preoccupied with Fullwood. There was more to his little tantrum than Warfield understood in the meeting. He thought how the whole episode had been rendered a waste of time by Joplan’s death, and began to think of Joplan again.

  Fleming retrieved the blankets from their saddles and climbed onto the rock with him as he told her about Joplan’s fate. They discussed it for awhile and then sat without talking. Fleming ran her fingers through his hair and rubbed his shoulders. Even the worst of worries lost some of their edge in such a place as this, and he stopped dwelling on Fullwood and Joplan and yielded to drowsiness. It seemed like no more than ten minutes later when he awoke. Fleming was under the blanket with him and had removed her clothes

  “There’s this particular therapy I recommend for you,” she said, nuzzling his neck.

  He pulled back and admired her. No woman was more beautiful to him than Fleming DeGrande. He was captured when he looked at her, but it wasn’t only her fine bones, her sharp jaw line. She was honest. Loving. Caring. Sexy. Easy to be with. And her eyes, the brim-full windows to the curiosity and excitement and intelligence that lay within. They had enough things in common. She put up with him, filled in where he fell short. She could out-think him half the time. He was at peace with her. That is, when he could put work aside.

  Fleming was the soft part of his life. He never thought of himself as unhappy before her, but he wasn’t in any hurry to try life again without her. She massaged something in his soul he didn’t know existed before.

  Now her full length of bare skin fused with his own. They lay still except for the little finger of Fleming’s right hand that traced out something on his face. With her lips almost touching his, she whispered something and smiled.

  “You’re asking for trouble, you know!” he said, as she rolled over on top of him. As he pulled her close she threw her head back to clear the hair from her face. They fell asleep on the rock after making love.

  Warfield was the first to quicken. One of the horses had neighed but that wasn’t what startled him. It was the distinctive crackle of twigs breaking beneath a two-footed being, but he couldn’t see anything because the blanket covered his head. In the instant he was weighing his options he felt the unmistakable sensation of a gun muzzle pressed into his back.

  “Just be right still now. Got this gun onya. Don’t you move none or you won’t never get outta this crick bottom alive.”

  The mountain characters in the movie Deliverance crossed Warfield’s mind. He calculated the movement he would have to make in order to disarm the gunman in a single continuous thrust. Since he was lying on his right arm, he had to rotate 180 degrees before he could make contact. The blanket would slow him down. It was risky, but Warfield decided it was the lesser of risks. He figured this man to be a farmer or rancher, who likely would hesitate before shooting another human being, but Fleming in her nakedness would be tempting to any perpetrator. He cursed himself for getting into such a compromising position. No weapon, completely undressed even. And out in the open. The only thing he had going for him was surprise, if he moved quickly enough.

  He gave Fleming a silent shush in the muted light that filtered through the blanket and waited for the gun barrel to touch him again for position, in case the gunman had moved. It had been no more than five seconds since the gunman first spoke when the gun poked Warfield again in the same spot. His muscles flexed into the ready position.

  “That somebody in there with you?”

  That was Warfield’s cue. He spun and catapulted himself sideways to the position he calculated the gunman occupied. His arm caught and deflected a long gun barrel and he kicked the man, who reeled backwards. First thing he saw was the shotgun hitting the ground, then the startled gunman a few feet away—on his back and scrambling to reach it. Warfield beat him to it and rammed the gun against the gunman’s throat.

  It was only then that Warfield realized he was an old man, perhaps in his eighties. He wore overalls and a baseball cap bearing a Skoal logo.

  Before Warfield could say anything he heard Fleming’s voice from the rock behind him. “Mr. Whitney? Oh my God! Is that you, Mr. Whitney?”

  * * *

  Whitney had wasted no time leaving the area but Warfield was disgusted with himself for getting into such a vulnerable position. He finished dressing and looked at Fleming.

  “What the hell’s he doing here, Fleming?”

  Despite her embarrassment Fleming hadn’t stopped laughing and was still fastening the last snap on her shirt. “He used to own this land. Nine hundred acres in all. My husband bought most of it from him before we married, but Mr. Whitney still has his home and a few acres across the creek. Since Tom died, Mr. Whitney sort of takes it on himself to investigate any unusual happenings on my property that he sees.”

  Warfield grudgingly smiled. “So he thinks that’s unusual—you naked on that flat rock?”

  “Au contraire, colonel. I think it was you dressed out in nothing but socks that turned him on.”

  * * *

  A few days later Warfield’s cell phone rang as he exited the parking lot at the Pentagon. He had met with Lieutenant General Robert T. Hendricks, the army’s principal military advisor to Lone Elm. One of Hendricks’ responsibilities was to keep Lone Elm stocked with a ready supply of people to train, which meant his staff had to track and maintain the files of the recruits designated for Lone Elm training as they processed through State Department and other filters up the line. Hendricks had approved the required number of candidates for the next Lone Elm class, which would begin in a month, and invited Warfield in to review them. They discussed the latest military scuttlebutt for an hour over lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon going through the files. Warfield got fidgety at long lunches, but such was the lubricant that kept the machines working.

  It was Macc Macclenny calling from Lone Elm. “Got a recruit here says he works for a general over in Russia you’re supposed to know. General Antonov? Sent you a message.”

  “Speak English?”

  “With an accent!”

  “Maybe because he’s Russian, Macc! Put him on.”

  “It’s a letter. Says his orders are to deliver it personally.”

  As Warfield drove west toward Lone Elm he thought of the nuclear assessment conference in Moscow where he’d met Antonov. It was one of many meetings with the goal of containing former Soviet nukes during the years that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and most of the Western nations were represented there. The U.S. team included a CIA rep, someone from State, and military brass including Warfield, a young officer with high hopes at the time.

  At an official dinner, Warfield happened to be seated next to Aleksei Antonov, a Russian general in his early forties. At first there was no serious conversation but toward the end of the evening Antonov, speaking quietly in English amid loud toasts, cigar smoke and war stories all around, told Warfield he’d heard of him in KGB briefings before the breakup. The general was concerned about the nuclear material stashed around the Soviet Union. It was an easy target. Russia had too many pressing problems to focus on any one of them in particular, even nukes, and they had lost control of the other Soviet bloc nations who also had nuclear stockpiles. None of that was news to Warfield even twenty years ago, but he had a gut feeling Antonov had more than the official bureaucratic interest in the problem. It was personal.

  “Retiring one of these years,” Antonov had told Warfield, “and then I will be in a better position to work on this problem. I can be more effective than the clumsy politicians and apparatchiks.”

  Warfield had let it drop that night. He had no authority to pursue anything like that off the record but he invited Antonov to notify him of any development the general thought h
e should know about. Warfield discussed it with his army superiors as they flew back to the U.S. but they dismissed it as the voice of Russian vodka. Nothing more had come of it since that night years ago.

  When Warfield got to Lone Elm, the Russian—tall, blond, about twenty-eight—stood tall and stiff as he shoved a giant hand out to the American. “Lieutenant Aleksandr Nosenko, sir.”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “General Aleksei Antonov sends you this message. He had it delivered to me at the airport in Moscow before I boarded my flight.”

  Warfield took the gray envelope from Nosenko. “You work with the general?” He peeled open the envelope as he spoke and looked for some sign of authenticity on the stationery.

  “Indirectly.”

  “He sent you here?”

  “The general is retired from the military but his opinion is given much weight. It was his request to the army that I come here for training.”

  “So you didn’t want to come?”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  Warfield smiled and elbowed his shoulder. “You’ll like it at Lone Elm, Lieutenant. Sergeant Macclenny here will see to that.”

  Warfield took the letter to his office. It was hand-written in English on expensive-looking paper. He closed the door and read it standing by the window.

  It was dated yesterday. “Colonel Warfield. I have learned one of our physicists has been recruited to transfer quantity of bomb-grade uranium to foreign agents in the Middle East. If my source is accurate, as I suspect, the quantity of uranium exceeds that used in the Hiroshima bomb. This physicist has not been identified, but is believed to have worked at Kremlyov. I am quite sure the Russian authorities will not deal with this quickly enough. Will inform you as the situation develops.” Antonov’s signature and email address followed.

  Kremlyov! Warfield had studied the ultra-secretive Soviet installation formerly known as Arzamas-16 during the Cold War. It was the Russians’ first and most important nuclear design center, built in 1946 on the site of a 200-year-old monastery in the city of Sarov, which then disappeared from all official maps. It was Arzamas-60 in the beginning, which by Russian postal designation meant it was sixty kilometers from the city of Arzamas. In their demand for secrecy the Russians changed its designation to Arzamas–16. They sent their top physics graduates there to work.

  Traffic was monitored twenty-five miles out from the center. Sensors warned of unauthorized visitors anywhere near the compound, and multiple walls and fences patrolled by armed guards and dogs protected the buildings that housed the nuclear materials.

  Kremlyov was self-sustaining. Residents’ clothing and food were produced within. Staff members were not often permitted to leave the city even for vacations. Now, years after the end of the Cold War, despite being given back its original name of Sarov, security remained high because of the sensitive materials stored there.

  When the Cold War ended, fifty-thousand weapons specialists from Kremlyov and other nuclear cities went overnight from the status of Russian elite to unemployed and forgotten. Workers who hadn’t been paid in months demonstrated in the streets. A joint effort by the European Union, Japan, Russia and the U.S. helped create peacetime projects to employ them, with some success. Still, there was real concern some scientists would be lured into the lucrative black market that existed for their skills. In recent times, under Vladimir Putin, Russia had downplayed the importance of the project.

  The nuclear materials remained under tight security and the scientists’ travels were monitored and limited. Any who might be tempted to sell out had to consider the possibility that their customer might kill them to protect their secret when their services were no longer needed. Yet Warfield knew there were those who would do it for the right money. Even with all the fences and dogs and elaborate security systems, some of them had the right keys and combinations to get to the nuclear material. A small package of weapons-grade uranium went a long way. The quantity equivalent to the Hiroshima bomb that killed four-hundred-thousand people would fit inside a business briefcase with room to spare.

  Warfield read Antonov’s note again and thought about Joplan. Warfield now thought it not unreasonable to connect him with the smuggling from the Soviet nuke stockpile General Antonov informed him of. But with Joplan dead he would never know.

  * * *

  After situating Lieutenant Nosenko, Macc caught Warfield in the Lone Elm parking lot as he was leaving. “How ’bout a beer?” He nodded in the direction of the It’ll Do Lounge, across the highway from the Lone Elm entrance.

  Warfield looked at his watch. Fleming was expecting him on this rare occasion that he could get home at a decent hour, and he also had to make a phone call, but the It’ll Do was tempting. For a long time Warfield was a regular at the place—country music, cold beer, Toni the sexy bartender who always had a trivia question floating around, good dance floor, single women there to meet the regulars as well as the trainees from Lone Elm—but his frequency dropped off after he met Fleming and started going to Hardscrabble after work instead of hanging out. Sometime later he reluctantly admitted to himself that the It’ll Do had become a destructive daily routine for him. Over a period of time the evenings grew into early mornings. A couple of beers grew into six or eight. Jack Daniels on the rocks replaced the beers. More than once he had woken up with a girl whose name he couldn’t remember. His daily five-mile run became hit-or-miss. Now when he looked back on those days he thanked God he pulled out of it before it ruined him. And Fleming. She didn’t cause his change—change comes from within—but in her he saw a dimension of life he had almost lost.

  “Can’t go,” he told Macc.

  Macc gave him a smile of pity and flapped his arms like a crowing rooster.

  As Warfield drove away, he saw Macc in the rear-view mirror still laughing at his boss, whom he was classifying as henpecked.

  On the drive to Hardscrabble he left a message for Earl Fullwood at the FBI to call him. Soon after he arrived at Fleming’s, FBI Deputy Director Rachel Gilbert returned his call, without explaining why Fullwood himself didn’t call. Warfield knew of her but they had never met. Gilbert said she knew who he was as well.

  Warfield gave her the gist of Antonov’s letter and explained how he knew the general.

  “I’m familiar with this intelligence,” Gilbert said. “It came in today.”

  Warfield was impressed. “And?”

  “We’re considering it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Whether it warrants any action at this time, for instance.”

  Warfield paused for a moment. “Help me out here. Do you mean you’re trying to decide whether the intelligence is valid, or that you believe the intelligence but don’t know what to do about it?”

  Gilbert paused. Warfield could hear her breathing pattern on the phone and knew she was not pleased. He had dared question the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  “Colonel Warfield, the Bureau has this intelligence and we’re quite capable of determining the best course of action. And maybe you aren’t aware that, uh…is this a secure phone?”

  “It is.”

  “Maybe you don’t realize this is a dry run we’re talking about.”

  “By that you mean that you believe the Russian will travel the route without the nukes, and if nobody seems to notice, he’ll do it again with the real stuff?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Well, if I’m a nuke smuggler that’s what I want the FBI to think.”

  “Don’t you think this Russian believes he can figure out what we will do, and adjust his activities accordingly?” she said.

  “I think he’s smart enough to convince you of what he wants you to believe.”

  Gilbert seemed to think about that for a while and said, “Colonel Warfield, I’m not going to discuss this with you. I understand you have—you had—a job to do for the president, but Director Fullwood…” She stopped mid-sentence.

&nbs
p; “Fullwood…?”

  “Sorry. Nothing.”

  “What about Fullwood, Ms. Gilbert?”

  She paused, then said, “He’s made it clear we will have no communication with you.”

  Warfield mulled over the conversation for a moment and went into the den where Fleming was catching up on medical journals. He knew she had held dinner for two hours.

  “Sorry, Babe, about dinner.”

  “Still warm.” She studied him. “Couldn’t avoid hearing the tone of that call. Something to drink first?”

  Warfield nodded. Fleming poured herself a glass of wine and opened a bottle of Sam Adams for him. She set out chips and a “spinach thing” she had made and sat down next to him on the sofa.

  “Something coming down?”

  Warfield was never careless with sensitive information even if it didn’t have a security classification, but it wasn’t unusual for him to confide in Fleming. She knew the critical nature of secrecy. He told her about the note from Antonov and the conversation with Rachel Gilbert and then changed the subject. It wasn’t worth talking about, at least not until the situation developed more.

  After eating dinner in virtual silence they watched TV for awhile, then at eleven-fifteen Fleming announced she was going to turn in. She kissed him on the lips. “Wake me when you come to bed.”

  Warfield lowered the lights in the den and sat in silence for the next half hour. He’d spent many good evenings at the old ranch house with Fleming. Always outside in the warm months, but there had been plenty of roaring fires in the huge fireplace on snowy nights. He reclined on the sofa and looked up at the rough-hewn beams supporting the roof and wondered how many others had done the same in the lifetime of the grand old house.