Джон Болл - The First Team

“I will tell you someting,” Zalinsky said. “Never before in your life have you been as close to death as you are at this moment.”

“Every soldier must accept the risks of his profession.”

“But you are not a soldier. I have trusted you and you have betrayed me.”

“That is not true, Mr. Zalinsky,” Hewlitt answered. “I did not ask for this role — it was thrust upon me. You told me once that you did not expect loyalty and would not believe it if it were offered to you. I remind you of the terms: that this conversation is confidential between you and me, this is to give you reasonable time to consult your government and make such arrangements as you would like. You are the first and only one to know what you know now.”

Zalinsky thought some more. “Rostovitch will kill you.”

Hewlitt leaned forward and once again successfully ignored the gnawing tension which had gripped him from the moment he had come into the office. “Mr. Zalinsky, the people whom I talked to were not joking — they meant what they said. If anything happens to me, whether it’s Colonel Rostovitch or anyone else, that will be taken as a sign that the terms are not accepted. In that event the order will be given to the Magsaysay to fire. You know what that means! And if anything does take me out of the picture, then you will have to deal with someone else — the First Team will see to that.”

Zalinsky bestirred himself and some of the old fire came back into him; he leaned forward and quite suddenly was as cold-eyed and hard as Hewlitt had ever seen him. “And you claim that you do not know who the First Team is?”

Hewlitt shook his head, wishing that his stomach would remain still for just a moment. Then he forced his voice to remain level. ‘They didn’t tell me that, and you know yourself that they wouldn’t. I don’t know who they are, how many, or where — but I do know now that they exist.”

Zalinsky looked hard and long at him, appraisal and suspicion amalgamized into a hard alloy. “There are other things you do not know,” he said suddenly. He paused and the words sank into Hewlitt; he waited then for the sentence of death to be pronounced against him. “This submarine, we know all about it. About the high diver who has been one of your CIA agents for a long time. And the captain — he is a Jew.”

For a moment the tension relaxed; Hewlitt shook his head. “No,” he said.

Zalinsky thrust a hard cold look clean through him. “How do you know?”

“It came out in our conversation.”

Zalinsky banged a fist on top of the President’s desk. “He is a Jew, I was told so. We know.”

Hewlitt watched him intently, knowing that for that moment he held a higher card. “He couldn’t be, Mr. Zalinsky.”

A fierce light sprang into Zalinsky’s eyes. “Do you know who he is?”

“Yes.”

“What is his name?”

“Nakamura. Commander Ishiro Nakamura.”

As Zalinsky slowly sagged back into his chair Hewlitt stood up. He had had about all that he could endure and he had to make good his escape. But he held himself successfully in check so that his voice was his own when he turned at the door.

“By the way, Mr. Zalinsky,” he said, “I haven’t forgotten your request for a doctor. I’ll do the very best that I can, but there may be a problem — so many of the very good ones have been forced out of the hospitals recently. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to go home and clean up.”

Zalinsky raised an arm and waved him away.

By the time that the first snowflakes were beginning to drift down into the gorges which separated the peaks of the Rockies one from another, the grip of economic depression had closed over the whole of the United States of America. The stock market was again operating, but it was a world of illusions and shadows; the substance of business growth and development was gone. Makeshifts and substitutes once more became a forced reality; good merchandise of almost any kind was increasingly hard to find. And skilled services normally available at short notice were spoken of more and more in the past tense. The whole pattern of living underwent a substantial change in outlook: people no longer planned for the future, they planned for the day immediately ahead and hoped to live it out in peace. Following that, if all went well, they would try to prepare for the next.

The rumor of the escaped submarine spread rapidly, peaked, and then gradually died away for lack of any kind of nourishment. There had been rumors also that England, France, Germany, and the Republic of China had formed a common front to bring about the liberation of the United States with a number of other powers, great and small, offering to contribute their share. Japan was reputed to be holding to a cautiously neutral position; the Pope had called for a withdrawal of the occupying forces and offered his good offices to bring about a peaceful settlement of all remaining outstanding problems. Israel also declared for the United States, but she was so desperately overwhelmed by mass migration from the United States that all of her resources were strained to absorb the influx and meet the continuing challenge of the militant Arab states at the same time.

Throughout most of the United States the feeling was common that the severe hold that the enemy had clamped onto the country would have to be relaxed; the shock of defeat and the near terror of the early occupation were past and gone, and the time was judged ripe for the occupying forces to ease their grip and start talking about the eventual day when national sovereignty would again become a reality. But as day succeeded day there was no evidence whatever that this was to take place at any time in the visible future. The enemy if anything was even more in evidence and he intruded himself into almost every facet of American life.

As the edge of winter began to be felt and the skies grew leaden overhead, the U.S.S. Ramon Magsaysay touched secretly at Wain-wright, Alaska. Although the enemy was in substantial possession of the continental United States, the vastness of Alaska and its remoteness from most of the commercial and industrial activity of the nation had spared it from the same intensity of occupation and supervision. It had been possible, therefore, for two massive pro-peller-driven C-124 Globemasters to cross the vast open tundra of the Arctic on apparently routine missions and to set down at

Wainwright on the eighty-six-hundred-foot runway unchallenged. There had not been a single representative of the enemy there, or any agent to report to him what was going on, when, under cover of a thick, steady snowstorm, the multidecked airlifters had been unloaded and the cargo had been transferred to lighters. By morning the supplies that the aircraft had brought in were gone; the planes themselves departed shortly thereafter despite the continuing snowfall, heading for Point Barrow and other stops along the northern supply route. Two passengers were carried out of Wainwright, men who were indistinguishable in their heavy parkas and cold weather clothing from the crew members who had come in.

Four days later the commander of the Hunters Point Shipyard reached the sanctuary that had been prepared in advance for him in Canada. As a presumed rescuee from the Yukon Territory he attracted little notice and, despite the presence of agents in the area, there was no notice of his arrival or any intimation as to his identity.

Walter Wagner returned almost quietly to the underground headquarters of Thomas Jefferson. As soon as he had showered and changed he sat down with his colleagues and filled them in completely on the operation. For the first time full details were available; in the e*xtensive debriefing, which took some time, Wagner brought them all up to date to the moment when he had ridden back toward Wainwright in a lighter, the snow shrouding even the ice-choked sea, and the nuclear submarine already invisible behind him. When he had finished, Admiral Haymarket spoke for them all. “Walt, I don’t need to tell you what your part in all this meant, but at the same time you know as well as I do that it was a team effort — here, at Hunters Point, at Mare Island, and at all of the places where we held them up and kept their aircraft on the ground.”