Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“Mallory, sir.”

“Jack, you remember your old platoon sarge, Bob Lee Swagger?”

“Jesus Christ, Bob Lee Swagger, you son of a bitch! I ain’t spoke to you in thirty years, since I medevaced out of the ’Nam. How the hell are you, Gunny? You done some great things in your third tour.”

“Well, I am okay, still kicking around on a pension, no bad problems.”

“Now what in hell is this all about? You bringing a missus to London and want a place to stay? I got an apartment and you can camp there all you want.”

“No, Jack, it ain’t that. It’s an S-2 thing.”

“You name it and it’s yours.”

“It’s not a big thing, a little favor.”

“Fire when ready, Gunny.”

“Now, I’m thinking that with your embassy security responsibilities, you have probably made contact with folks in the British security apparatus.”

“I deal with Scotland Yard and the two MI’s all the goddamn time. We got two officers over here, but, shit, you know officers.”

“Do I ever. So, anyhow, you got a good NCO-type in Six or Five you know?”

“Jim Bryant, used to be a color sergeant in SAS. He now handles embassy coordination in security for MI-6. I meet with him all the goddamn time, especially when we have people coming in that present security problems.”

“Good, counted on that. Now, here’s the thing. In 1970, a guy named Fitzpatrick operated in Great Britain, but I think he was a Russian agent, or a Russian-hired agent. I don’t know who the hell he was or what he did or what became of him, but it would be goddamned helpful for me to find out. Could you run that by your pal and see what shakes out? Their intel people would have the shit on him if anybody did.”

“Gunny, what’s this all about?”

“Old business. Very old business that’s come around and is biting me in the ass.”

“Okay, I’ll give it a run. If it’s in there and it ain’t real top-secret or whatever, Jim Bryant can nose it out for me. I’ll get back to you soonest. What’s your time frame?”

“Well, I’m about to sack out now. It’s getting close to midnight over here.”

“I’ll give Jim a call and get to him as soon as possible. You got a number?”

“Let me call you. What’s a good time?”

“Call me at 1800 hours my time. That would be, what, 1100 yours?”

“That’s it.”

“Get me direct at 04-331-22-09. Right to my office; don’t go through the embassy switchboard.”

“Good man.”

“You got me on that chopper, Gunny. Wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t. I owe you this one.”

“Now we’re even, Jack.”

“Out here.”

“Out,” said Bob.

He went back to his car and drove to the motel. His room had been expertly tossed and everything replaced neatly, including the cap on his toothpaste tube. But they’d been here, he could tell. They were watching him.

He undressed, showered and turned the lights out. It would be more comfortable in here than out there.

He went to breakfast at a Denny’s the next morning, went for a little walk, watching the campers struggle to stay unseen, and precisely at 1100, put his long-distance call through to London.

“Mallory here.”

“Jack.”

“Howdy, Gunny.”

“Any luck?”

“Well, yes and no.”

“Shoot.”

“This Fitzpatrick is more rumor or innuendo than actual operator. The Brits know he operated here around that time, but that info came late, from decoded radio intercepts after he’d gone on to his next duty station, wherever the hell that was. But there was no way of covering him through their regular ways of watching, which means he didn’t operate out of an embassy or a known cell.”

“Is that strange?”

“As in, very strange.”

“Ummmm,” said Bob.

“So they have no photos. Nobody knows what he looks like. Nobody really knows who he was, whether he was a recruited Irishman or a native-born Russian citizen. They do say that when the Russians go abroad, they tend more than not to impersonate Irishmen, because there’s a correspondence between the accents. In other words, a Russian can’t play an Englishman in England or an American in America, but they’ve got a good record of playing an Irishman in England or America. The Russian phonetic ah sound is very similar in tongue placement to the ae of the classic Irish accent.”

“So they think he’s Russian?”

“Ah, they can’t say for sure. That seems to be the best possible interpretation. The file has been dead for nearly fifteen years. Poor Jim had to drive all the way out to a records depository to even find the goddamn thing.”

“I see.”

“They only have some radio transmissions and some defector debriefings.”

“What would they be?”

“Ah, a guy came over in seventy-eight and then another came over in eighty-one, both low-level KGB operatives, in political trouble, afraid they were going to get an all-expenses-paid TDY to the gulags. They gave up everything they had: a funny thing, you know, the Russians are all worried about confusing issues so they ‘register’ work names, code names, the like; they got so many agencies, they want to make sure nobody uses the name and things get all fouled up. The work name ‘Robert Fitzpatrick’ was one item in the registry that both these guys gave up. But here’s the odd part.”

“Okay.”

“According to these guys, to both of ’em, he wasn’t in the First Directorate. That’s the KGB section that specializes in foreign operations, recruitments, penetrations, that sort of thing.”

“The straight-up spies.”

“Yeah, you know, hiring informants, getting pictures, running networks, working out of embassies, that sort of thing. The usual KGB deal.”

“So what was he?”

“According to these clerks, the work name ‘Robert Fitzpatrick’ was the property of GRU.”

“And what was that?”

“GRU is Russian military intelligence.”

“Hmmm,” said Bob again, unsure what this information could possibly mean. “He was army?” he finally asked.

“Well, yes and no. I asked Jim too. It seems GRU was uniquely tasked with penetration of strategic targets. That is, missiles, nuke delivery systems, satellite shit, that whole shebang. All the big atomic spies, like the Rosenbergs, like Klaus Fuchs, all them guys — they were GRU. This guy Fitzpatrick would be interested — I mean, if he existed, if he was Russian, if this, if that — he’d be doing something that was global, not local. He’d be trying to get inside our missile complexes, bomb plants, research facilities, the satellite program, anti-missile research.”

“Shit,” said Bob, seeing the thing just twist out of his control. “Man, I don’t know crap about that and I’m much too old to learn.”

“Plus you got your other problem; the Soviet Union broke up, all these guys went who-knows-where. Some are still working for Russian GRU, some are working for KGB or other competing organizations with different agendas, some for the Russian mafia, some for all these little republics. If it was hard to understand then, it don’t make no sense now.”

“Yeah. Anything else?”

“Gunny, that’s it. It ain’t much. A possible name, a suggestion of possible affiliation. Man, that’s all they got.”

“Christ,” said Bob. He searched his memory for anything that he had learned about Trig that touched on any issue of strategic warfare, but came up blank. It was all Vietnam, the war, that sort of thing.

“Sorry I wasn’t any help.”

“Jack, you were great. I’m much obliged.”

“Talk to you.”

“Out here.”

“Out.”

Bob put the phone down, more confused than ever. He felt everything was now hopelessly twisted out of his slender ability to grasp it. The “strategic” business had him buffaloed. Where the hell did that come from? What did it mean?