Who's on First (11 page)

The waiter nodded, “Dreher.”

“
Bien
.” He turned to Bolgin, who addressed him in English.

“Do I suppose it goes well with your friends?”

“It went exactly as we planned.”

“Very well. Now, let us reflect for a little moment. We know that Oakes was very indispensable to finance and to organize the contact points for Hungarian escapees. In six months we have exterminated three of them—yours, of course, we finished as soon as we got your message in Vienna. But we couldn't get anything out of the old lady about the others. She did not know, or she would not talk: We'll not know ever which at this point. Ah, a tough business, eh József?

“Now, our friend Oakes, he will of course insist to your colleagues that he is innocent. Are you quite certain your … friends … they are convinced it was Oakes who gave us the address on Dohany Street?”

“Quite certain—though they know him only as ‘Harry.' I led them to that conclusion the very night of the execution. I told them that Theo had told me his American friend had given him a special address on Dohany, but that Theo never gave me the number on that street. They are absolutely convinced it was Harry.”

“Good! To prove himself innocent it isn't certain what he will attempt. But we know what we desire. Yes, of course, we desire anything you can get from him that would pleasingly surprise us. For instance, any special contacts in Paris. Information on any operations he might be doing. What would help is if he told you where the other contacts are in Budapest that are still operating. Because the girl Frieda and your other friend, I forget his name …?”

“Erno. Erno Toth.”

“… they might, Oakes will calculate, know that he is telling the truth if he gives the names and locations of the contacts—they might have heard about one or two or three of those contact points from other refugees.”

“I doubt it. The refugees are all tight-lipped. You know that. I haven't had any successes for you on that front.”

“Well,” Bolgin said, sipping his glass of water, “a man gets pretty desperate when he is walking toward the hanging rope, eh József? I am certain Mr. Oakes will think of
something
worth you repeating to me.”

József smiled. “What shall we do when he is talked out, Colonel?”

“What shall you do? Why, my dear József, you will hang Mr. Oakes. Yes”—Bolgin raised his glass of mineral water as if to toast the idea—“Moscow would like that. In fact”—his eyebrows came together—“Bolgin would like that! You will of course take a photograph. You will say to your confederates it is essential for the morale of the ‘Freedom Fighters,' eh? But also—and you will
not
say,” he chuckled, “essential for the morale of Moscow, and excellent for the morale of Bolgin. The morale of Bolgin is also worth some maintaining, is it not true, József?” Bolgin laughed almost convulsively. “Blackford Oakes, the picture-poster secret star of the great Central Intelligence Agency. Hanged as a traitor—by the Hungarian Freedom Fighters Oakes helped escape from Hungary! It is too delicious. We shall see that it gets leaked, gets worldwide leaked! Do you ever see the
National Review,
József?”

József said that although he read several American periodicals, he did not read
National Review
.

“It is edited by this young bourgeois fanatic. Oh, how they cried about the repression of the counterrevolutionaries in Budapest! But the
National Review,
it is angry also with the CIA for—I don't know, not starting up a Third World War, maybe? Last week—I always read the
National Review,
it makes me so funny-mad—last week an editorial said”—he raised his head and appeared to quote from memory—“‘The attempted assassination of Sukarno last week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everybody in the room was killed except Sukarno.'” Bolgin roared, and suddenly wished his mineral water were vodka. Should he order some?
No!
No, a thousand times no! He marshaled his thought. His features returned to pop-Bolshevik: “We will distribute that picture,” he said soberly. “‘Hungarian Freedom Fighters/Execute U.S. CIA Agent/Caught Collaborating with KGB.' Such black eyes for our friends in the CIA, no, József?”

“Yes! Terrific!… Say, Colonel. You know, it is getting very expensive, life in Paris. And I do need my own automobile. Renting one from time to time for specific missions, well, it isn't entirely satisfactory.”

Bolgin, prepared, reached into his pocket and extended his hand under the table.

“What you find in this envelope there will be five times of when the photograph comes to me.”

13

“I am very sorry, Dean. Did Martha bring you tea? Ah yes; I see she did.” The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency poured himself a cup and sat down. “In the situation I was in it would have been awkward to tell anybody ‘Please call Dean Acheson and tell him I'll be late.'”

“
Pace
. I know how those things are,” the tall distinguished figure with the waxed moustache replied in drawling Grotonian. “I have been enjoying the afternoon paper. It recounts the inside story of the shake-up in the Kremlin. Molotov led the fight against Khrushchev, charging that he had been a failure in foreign policy. Poor old Molotov,” the former Secretary sighed exaggeratedly. “Obviously the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact went to his head. As a perfectionist, he cannot stand lesser diplomacy.” His eyes were still on the paper. “Hmm … Molotov out. Malenkov out. Kaganovich out. At this rate, Allen, I shall soon be left without any personal friends in the Presidium.”

The Director laughed, stirred his tea, and said then, gravely, “It was a very long meeting, Dean, and tension is building.”

“Do you wish to tell me about it?” That obviously was exactly what the Director wished to do, else why would he have asked especially to see him after the National Security Council meeting?

The Director stirred his tea for a minute, and got up to turn off the air conditioning. “You may remember my telling you after the May Day exhibition that our analysts were tempted to conclude that the next big phase in Soviet strategic armament would center on long-range bombers. They flew nine of those huge Bisons over Moscow in tight formation—that's a hell of an airplane, the equivalent of our B-52. Some of our people projected they'd bypass rockets, for one armament generation in any case, and go heavy with the airplanes. So we sent out orders to our spotters: ‘Bring in as much information as you can to point us in the right direction.' We want to know, for instance, how many Bisons have they actually got.”

“Do you have the answer?”

“As far as we can figure out, they have nine. In other words, they flew their entire goddam fleet over Moscow.”

“Don't swear, Allen.”

“Is that what you used to tell Harry Truman?”

“Presidents are allowed to swear. Second Samuel 19, Verse 23.”

“Now of course we don't
know
this for sure, but there certainly aren't a lot of Bisons, and they don't seem to be coming off the assembly lines.”

“Do I take it our President is reconciled to a little skywatching? And has your brother the Secretary of State found any theological objections?”

The Director laughed. “You'd think Ike had invented the U-2 himself. You remember he only grudgingly allowed us to
produce
it, said he doubted he'd ever permit us to
use
it. He's got now so he's absolutely hooked on the U-2 reports.”

“You mean he prefers them to Zane Grey?”

“Oh come off it, Dean. Ike didn't become General of the Army by specializing in military ignorance.”

“That's true. He specialized in other forms of ignorance.”

“Shall I go on?” The Director was mildly exasperated.

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, as you know, we've been tracking Kapistan Yar for a couple of years. Total radar monitoring of all their rocket activity, which has been progressing, but without any spectacular breakthrough. Well, last week our birdie, coming in from Peshawar in Pakistan to Adana in Turkey, photographed some interesting stuff, which we have developed, and which was the reason for the special meeting this afternoon. Remember the name ‘Tyura Tam.' By contrast, Kapistan Yar is a Potemkin village.”

“Where is Tyura Tam?”

“It's 680 miles east of Kapistan Yar, on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. They need the railroad because of the weight of the fuel and rockets. The base is sixty miles by ten miles, on a line extending from the northern tip of the Aral Sea”—the Director pulled out an atlas, ran his eye over the table of contents, opened it, and put it in front of his friend—“to the middle of Lake Balkhash. The big stuff is there: sixty- to seventy-foot-tall missiles. They look bloody well ready to go.”

“How does a missile look ‘ready to go'?”

“The assumptions are based on comparative appearance. If you get a dozen missiles in a row, a mile between missiles, comparisons will tell you those on which work has been apparently completed. These missiles use the RD-107 as the basic launch vehicle. There is no doubt in our minds that at least one or maybe more of those missiles is designed to launch an earth satellite. That satellite is intended to electrify the world—which it will, if it's the first one—and the achievement of that one launch will establish beyond any doubt that the bombers were a ruse—that the highest priority and the best brains in Russia have been devoted to developing an international ballistics missile powerful enough to lift their heavy thermonuclear heads but also smart enough to guide them to any target within a projected range of 5,500 miles.”

“Does that mean Texas would still be safe?”

“Well, yes.”

“Too bad.”

“The effect of that satellite—a symbol of a burgeoning technology that threatens Soviet strategic preeminence—can't be exaggerated. However, they are stumped on one thing.”

“What is it? Don't tell me if you don't want to.”

“They are stumped because they don't know how to increase the power of—I'm using layman's language—”

“Why not? After all you
are
a layman.”

“… increase the power of the transistor crystals. Without that power the satellite, even if launched, would be uncontrollable, would emit no durable radio signal, and would be useless in accumulating and recording scientific data.”

“Is this crystal business you speak of something we know how to do?”

“It is, thank God. And we came on it quite by accident. Courtesy of the private enterprise system, as it happens. Moreover, Dean, as we sit here, the Soviet Union—if only it knew—could pick up something called a Van de Graaff. Van de Graaff, by the way, isn't a seventeenth-century Dutchman. He's a live MIT professor. The machine is manufactured, of all places, in Massachusetts. The unit is about the size of a Volkswagen, costs a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and increases the potency of transistors by means of an electron beam bombardment that irregularizes transistor crystals.”

“I don't understand that.”

“Neither do I. I'm just telling you: That's
all
they're missing. They simply don't know that the irregularization of transistor crystals can increase their potency by a factor of one hundred. A fifty-cent transistor can be turned into a thirty-dollar transistor by passing through a Van de Graaff.”

“How do you know they don't have it?”

“That's something, Dean, I
do
mind telling you.”

“Very well. How long would your people guess before they crack it?”

“That's the damnedest thing. We
don't know
. Conceivably they could come on the thing tomorrow. But then conceivably they could poke about six, eight, ten months before getting it. And by
that
time we should get our birdie up there.”

“What's holding us up?”

“Agreement on the right blend of launching fuel. There are advocates of just about every combination. We were able to guess when we took a hard look at the size of the Russian rockets, and checked the performance of their western base, that they've licked the fuel problem. We only just now have an inkling of what it is they are on to.”

“Yes?”

“Liquefied ozone. Liquid ozone is something the rocket-types sometimes call ‘supercharged oxygen.' Ozone that hasn't been liquefied is incredibly dangerous and erratic. Our Dr. Dornberger has said he wouldn't stand several miles from any launch site using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Ozone, in a liquid form, they have thought of as ideal—if it could be distilled in totally pure form. Ideal in terms of withstanding vibration, heat, impact. One guy not long ago thought he had perfected a 100 percent pure liquid ozone—which promptly exploded. (He died, by the way, Dean, intestate.) It looks as though the Russians have developed a means of stabilizing ozone for liquid-fueled monster rockets. And it looks as though we will eventually learn how to do this. Once we've got it, using just the ozone, or a combination, we can go.”

“So what it comes down to is: They need the Van de Graaff. We need, so to speak, their ozone formula.”

“That's a fair way to put it.”

“And we think we're about to discover the ozone formula, but they know nothing about Van de Graaff?”

“That's an optimistic way of putting it.”

“Well, you put it your way.”

“I am telling you something known to the President and six—now seven—Americans. Which is that we hope by the end of this week to have the ozone formula.”

“Once we get it, how long before we can fire?”

“We figure, as closely as possible, six to eight months.”

“How long would it take them to go if they got the Van de Graaff?”

“Two weeks.”

The former Secretary paused. “It is obvious what we want and what we don't have.”