Conspiracy (40 page)

The other Soviet official who watched without surprise was Felix Chelkar, the aging head of the KGB. 

Like Kuybyshev, Chelkar had realized that the World Cup Final was the most efficient communications pathway to the world. 

Unlike his fellow Politburo member, however, Chelkar did not believe that a brief interruption in TV coverage of even the world’s biggest sports event would be sufficient to ignite a global anti-American fervor. A tragedy of some kind would be required—one that could be blamed on the Americans.

Accordingly, Chelkar had given the mission in just those general terms to Pyotr Tavda, an agent he had personally run in America during the sixties and seventies. More specific instructions were unnecessary. 

Known to some as the
Patrón
, Tavda was not a man who shrank from killing. Chelkar knew his man would produce something memorable.

But Chelkar had not reached the top of the KGB by simple trust in his operatives. He added a codicil to his orders, one known as the Izhevsk Limitation Proviso, after the KGB chief who had first employed it during the last days of Khrushchev’s reign. 

With Izhevsk, knowledge of any delicate operation was limited to an agreed-upon number of agents. If more than the agreed-upon number participated in the operation, Izhevsk mandated that the surplus agents be killed.

The number that Chelkar and Pyotr Tavda had agreed upon was three. Chelkar was one, of course. Tavda—ready to drop his identity as Ross Cantrell forever before he returned to Moscow—was the second, naturally. 

The third was Helena Yamal, a strikingly beautiful agent from the Azerbaijan region. Despite rather overdeveloped libidinal drives, or perhaps because of them, Helena had done remarkably useful work for Chelkar in Iran during recent years.

Though he did not know the details of the operation, Chelkar would not have been surprised to learn that Helena had slit the throat of the Thin One on the beach in Marbella. The Thin One had expected to kill Groves, because the Thin One had been told that the Izhevsk number for this operation was four. 

Groves’s death and that of Raul Coquias, as well as “Molly”, had also been mandated by Izhevsk. So too was the death, in the Libyan port city of Banghazia, of a certain oil tanker captain. Helena had used another KGB operative for that mission, but since the outsider knew nothing of the purpose behind the killing, the Izhevsk Limitation Proviso was still in force.

As a further precaution against the repercussions that would follow Tavda’s work in Madrid—whether that work was successful or not—Chelkar had discreetly loosed some rumors in Dzerzhinsky Square. KGB was planning something splashy to discredit America, those rumors said. Some said the event would occur in the summer of ’82; others said the following fall, or the winter or spring of ’83. Some cited Madrid as the “splash” point. Others cited New York, Prague, Zurich, even Caracas. 

If Tavda failed in Madrid, no fingers of blame would point to Chelkar—because none would know that a failure had taken place.

This technique ensured Chelkar time to devise an alternative incident, if one was required. Or perhaps he would simply wait and claim credit when the Americans made another of their foreign-policy blunders somewhere in the world.

But neither would Chelkar acknowledge KGB involvement if Tavda succeeded. He had known from the beginning the strength of the Soviet
futbol
team, the likelihood that they would be playing in Bernabeau for the championship—and the probability that some would be killed in whatever operation Tavda devised. No man in the USSR, not even the head of the dreaded KGB, could openly acknowledge that he had authorized the martyrdom of twenty-five Soviet
futbol
heroes. 

And no prudent head of the KGB could admit that he had authorized a mass murder outside the USSR, regardless of whether or not Soviet athletes were among those present. The consequences if the deaths were tracked back to Moscow were simply too great to justify that kind of an action before a Politburo committee or before the Prime Minister.

So if Tavda succeeded, Chelkar would tell Kuybyshev that the Madrid incident now served better than anything the KGB could do, and leave the matter there.

Chelkar felt secure. His precautions had safeguarded him from either failure or success in Madrid. He settled back to watch the U.S. State Department official.

21

In Madrid, the UBC signal now broadcast on the TV Espana channel was amplified for local reception. Those electronic impulses, coming as they did from the antenna complex near Madrid International Airport, were strong and clear at the end of Runway C-2. They penetrated the metal skin of the Lockheed flying lab
Hecuba
with no difficulty. The same impulses that caused nearly a billion TV screens around the world to register the image of Elliott Strether scratching his left ear now reached the detonator boxes being examined by U.S. Air Force staff.

One of those boxes had been programmed to act the moment it received that particular eight-second electronic pattern.

Inside the detonator box, a spring-loaded mechanism, triggered electronically, clicked and whirred. The young air force lieutenant tinkering with some of the boxes heard the noise. She reached out and picked up the activated black box, inspecting it closely. 

Just then, another of the thirty black boxes on her workbench clicked and whirred.

She picked up her telephone. “Get me Colonel Ferguson,” she said.

22

The guard opened the steel-clad door to the players’ tunnel.  The roar of the crowd burst into the locker room. 

Sharon urged the man to hurry. She knew how quickly the shouts of the spectators could change to gasps of pain, and then to silence. 

One grenade
, Dr. Ferguson had said. One grenade could kill everyone in the stadium, all one hundred twenty thousand people. The gas would remain inside Bernabeau more than long enough to be lethal, the doctor had told them, no matter what weather conditions prevailed, because of the way the stadium was constructed. The playing field had been scooped out three stories below ground level; the height of the stadium extended four stories above ground level. 

In effect, a seventy-foot wall blocked the wind from dispersing the deadly cloud of gas. Cantrell, or whoever had planned this massacre, had made a malignantly inspired choice of weapons.

Sharon ran behind the guard through the shadowy concrete tunnel, to the end of the chain-link fence extension that prevented spectators from entering, and out to the bright green turf. 

Few in the crowd noticed them. None of the Argentine players or support staff on the Argentine bench took his eyes from the action on the field. Neither did Nancy Harrington, who was working the UBC field-level camera a few yards up the sideline. 

Rachel Quinn, however, doing sideline commentary nearby, had better peripheral vision.

“Sharon!” she called out. “What’s going on?”

Her plan already formed, Sharon ran up to the camera platform and motioned Rachel to come over. She had to scream to make herself heard over the crowd noise.

The scoreboard clock showed two minutes and fourteen seconds of playing time remaining.

Rachel Quinn stared at the scoreboard for a moment after Sharon finished talking. Then she pressed the “on” switch of her handheld mike.

In the UBC control truck, Wayne Taggart pushed his cowboy hat back from his forehead in irritation. “I’ve got to
what
?” he demanded. “Listen, Rachel, I’ve made a decision about that tape and I’m not going back on that decision because Sharon Foster takes it into her head—”

“Look,” Rachel interrupted. “There’s a Cobor bomb here, and another in Max’s camera! You’ve got to call him on the director’s line and tell him to start looking for it. Now do that before we all get killed!”

Taggart reacted as he knew a director ought to react in a crisis. He flicked the switch to open the communication link with Camera Nine, Max’s field-level unit. “Max,” he said, “I’m told there may be a poison gas bomb inside your camera. You’re to start removing the camera shell right away to look for it. A black cylinder, the same kind they found up in the stands earlier today.”

Then the realization hit him that he was not talking about images on a screen. He was talking about a real bomb. What the air force doctor had said returned to his memory with sepulchral resonance:
The canister you are looking at now would be enough to kill every man, woman, and child in Bernabeau Stadium
. . . .

The sweat of fear moistened his palms. His heartbeat increased wildly; he felt the palpitations throbbing underneath his blue silk shirt. “Holy shit,” he whispered to himself. “I’ve got to get out!”

He pushed back his chair and bolted for the door of the studio truck. He had forgotten to take off his headset mike, and as he ran, its rubber-coated connecting cord popped out of the jack beneath the control panel and trailed behind him like a curly black tail.

From the assistant producer’s chair, an astonished Cindy Ling watched Taggart’s retreating figure. “What in the world got into him?” she asked Billy, the technical director.

Billy was staring at the open door. “Maybe he had to go to the john,” he said.

Then he grinned at Cindy. “Ever direct a World Cup Championship before?”

“Wayne!” Rachel Quinn screamed into her microphone out on the field. “Wayne, it’s that news tape that’s going to trigger the bombs! You’ve got to shut it off right away!”

She listened for a reply in her headset, but there was none. Only the sound of an open line.

“Wayne!” she screamed again. “Wayne!”

Taggart was outside the UBC control truck now, running across the stadium tarmac to the exit gate. That gate had been locked since well before the game. The attendant whose job it was to guard the lock had strayed over to the next gate, which afforded a view of one of the TV Espana monitor sets.

“Let me out!” Taggart cried, pressing his face against the steel bars. “Let me out!”

He saw no one to help him in the stadium parking lot— only empty cars and two souvenir vendors who were engrossed in the radio account of the game coming through on their transistor sets.

Turning, Taggart raced to the inside end of the stadium tunnel, toward the spectator seats and terraces on the Soviet side of the playing field. The chain-link gates had been shut to block their pathway also, but at least Wayne could see uniformed guards.

“You’ve got to open the outside gates!” he screamed. “There’s a bomb on the field that could kill us all!”

One of the guards heard the
Americano’s
raving. He gestured for another, who spoke English, to come over.

“Poison gas!” Wayne cried, on the verge of hysteria. “Poison gas on the playing field! We’ve got to get out now!”

A woman spectator on the edge of the stands also understood English. She looked at Taggart’s ID card, clipped to his shirt pocket. Then she looked down on the playing field, to the right of the Soviet bench, where Max, the UBC cameraman, was frantically prying the cover from his camera.

“Gas!” The woman screamed, echoing Taggart’s cry. “
Pomona!
”

She stepped down from her front-row terrace position, for which she had paid nearly fifty dollars in
pesetas
, and ran for the gate.

The guard had been briefed on
desastre
control. He recalled discussion of the 1964 tragedy in Peru’s Lima Stadium, where 318 people had been crushed to death because doors to the tunnel exits had been locked. He quickly opened the exit gate and ran ahead of the woman, side by side with Wayne Taggart, to open the outer gate of the tunnel.

The cry of “
peligro
!” spread quickly. The attention of many fans remained on the game, but soon there was a steady stream of people leaving their seats on the Soviet side of the field and heading for the exit.

Across the field near the Argentine bench, Sharon pulled the Cobor grenade from its hiding place in the battery-pack cavity of Nancy’s camera. She pressed down on the small black box and twisted it counterclockwise. The detonator and the cylinder separated in her hands.

Sharon passed the black cylinder over to the young guard who had brought her to the field. He looked at the grenade with very wide eyes.

“We’ve got to run across the field to disconnect the other two,” Sharon said to the man. “I’ll need you to come with me.”

“I’ll come too,” Rachel cried. “Show me where to look for the other grenade!”

Sharon nodded. She and the guard started running across the field. 

More than a hundred thousand fans, and the two dozen players and support staff on the benches, gasped in astonishment. At the far end of the field, however, play continued.

Rachel handed her microphone over to Nancy. “Keep trying to reach Taggart!” she commanded. “Tell him he’s got to stop that newsreel tape!” Then she too ran for the Soviet side.

The scoreboard clock began the countdown of the game’s final minute.

On the Soviet bench, Yuri Zadiev saw Sharon coming full speed across the field. He saw the Cobor grenade in the right hand of the security guard, the detonator in the other. 

Zadiev got to his feet.

In the guard’s hand, the detonator box began to click and whir as the signal from the tape broadcast reached its miniaturized receiver. The guard felt the movement. Acting on reflex, he dropped the box as though it had become white hot.

Zadiev saw the fear on the man’s face, and realized that this was not going to be some kind of suicidal attack. He saw too that the American woman reporter was now coming after Sharon, and that the group was running not for the Soviet bench, but for the UBC camera that had been taking Katya’s picture all evening from fifteen yards upfield along the sideline.

The cameraman, Zadiev noticed, had removed the eyepiece hood of his machine and was prying at a piece of metal beneath the surface of the camera.

Zadiev turned to Katya, who was watching beside him. “You stay right here,” he said in Russian. “Remember what I have told you.”