Clive Cussler - Cyclops

"You're telling me that Raymond LeBaron and his crew were exchanged for three dead Soviet cosmonauts?"

Emmett nodded. "We were even able to put a name on them through a defector, a former flight surgeon with the Russian space program. He'd examined each of them on several occasions."

"When did he defect?"

"He came over to our side in August of '87."

"A little over two years ago."

"That's correct," Emmett acknowledged. "The names of the cosmonauts found in LeBaron's blimp are Sergei Zochenko, Alexander Yudenich, and Ivan Ronsky. Yudenich was a rookie, but Zochenko and Ronsky were both veterans with two space flights apiece."

"I'd give my next year's salary to know how they came to be inside that damned blimp."

"Regrettably, we turned up nothing concerning that part of the mystery. At the moment, the only Russians circling the earth are four cosmonauts on board the Salyut 9 space station. But the NASA people, who are monitoring the flight, say they're all in good health."

The President nodded. "So that eliminates any Soviet cosmonaut on a space flight and leaves only those on the ground."

"That's the odd twist," Emmett continued. "According to the forensic pathology people at Walter Reed, the three men they examined probably froze to death while in space."

The President's eyebrows raised. "Can they prove it?"

"No, but they say several factors point in that direction, starting with the borscht paste and the analysis of other condensed foods the Soviets are known to consume during space travel. Also evident were physiological signs the men had breathed air of a high oxygen constant and spent considerable time in a weightless environment."

"Wouldn't be the first time the Soviets have launched men into space and failed to retrieve them. They could have been up there for years, and fell to earth only a few weeks ago after their orbit decayed."

"I'm only aware of two instances where the Soviets suffered fatalities," said Emmett. "The cosmonaut whose craft became tangled in the shrouds of its reentry parachute and slammed into Siberia at five hundred miles an hour. And the three Soyuz crewmen who died after a faulty hatch leaked away their oxygen."

"The disasters they couldn't cover up," said the President. "The CIA has recorded at least thirty cosmonaut deaths since the beginning of their space missions. Nine of them are still up there, drifting around in space. We can't advertise the fact on our end because it would jeopardize our intelligence sources."

"We-know-but-they-don't-know-we-know kind of affair."

"Precisely."

"Which brings us back to the three cosmonauts we've got lying here in Washington," said Emmett, clutching his briefcase on his lap.

"And a hundred questions, beginning with, Where did they come from?"

"I did some checking with the Aerospace Defense Command Center. Their technicians say the only spacecraft the Russians have sent aloft large enough to support a manned crew-- besides their orbiting station shuttles-- were the Selenos lunar probes."

At the word "lunar" something clicked in the President's mind. "What about the Selenos probes?"

"Three went up and none came back. The Defense Command boys thought it highly unusual for the Soviets to screw-up three times in a row on simple moon orbiting flights."

"You think they were manned?"

"I do indeed," said Emmett. "The Soviets wallow in deception. As you suggested, they almost never admit to a space failure. And keeping the buildup for their coming moon landing clouded in secrecy was strictly routine."

"Okay, if we accept the theory the three bodies came from one of the Selenos spacecraft, where did it land? Certainly not through their normal reentry path over the steppes of Kazakhstan."

"My guess is somewhere in or around Cuba."

"Cuba." The President slowly rolled the two syllables from his lips. Then he shook his head. "The Russians would never allow their national heroes, living or dead, to be used for some kind of crazy intelligence scheme."

"Maybe they don't know"

The President looked at Emmett. "Don't know?"

"Let's say for the sake of argument that their spacecraft had a malfunction and fell in or near Cuba during reentry. About the same time, Raymond LeBaron and his blimp show up searching for a treasure ship and are captured. Then, for some unfathomable reason, the Cubans switch the cosmonauts' bodies for LeBaron and his crew and send the blimp back to Florida."

"Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?"

Emmett laughed. "Of course, but considering the known facts, it's the best I can come up with."

The President leaned back and stared at the ornate ceiling. "You know, you just might have struck a vein."

A quizzical look crossed Emmett's face. "How so?"

"Try this on for size. Suppose, just suppose, Fidel Castro is trying to tell us something."

"He picked a strange way to send out a signal."

The President picked up a pen and began doodling on a pad. "Fidel has never been a stickler for diplomatic niceties."

"Do you want me to continue the investigation?" Emmett asked.

"No," the President answered tersely.

"You still insist on keeping the bureau in the dark?"

"This is not a domestic matter for the justice Department, Sam. I'm grateful for your help, but you've taken it about as far as you can go."

Emmett snapped his attaché case shut and rose to his feet. "Can I ask a touchy question?"

"Shoot."

"Now that we've established a link, regardless of how weak, to a possible abduction of Raymond LeBaron by the Cubans, why is the

President of the United States keeping it to himself and forbidding his investigative agencies to follow up?"

"A good question, Sam. Perhaps in a few days we'll both know the answer."

Moments after Emmett left the Oval Office, the President turned in his swivel chair and stared out the window. His mouth went dry and sweat soaked his armpits. He was gripped by foreboding that there was a tie between the Jersey Colony and the Soviet lunar probe disasters.

<<15>>

Ira Hagen stopped his rental car at the security gate and displayed a government ID card. The guard made a phone call to the visitors center of the Harvey Pattenden National Physics Laboratory, then waved Hagen through.

He drove up the drive and found an empty space in a sprawling parking lot crowded by a sea of multicolored cars. The grounds surrounding the laboratory were landscaped with clusters of pine trees and moss rock planted amid rolling mounds of grass. The building was typical of tech centers that had mushroomed around the country. Contemporary architecture with heavy use of bronze glass and brick walls curving at the corners.

An attractive receptionist, sitting behind a horseshoe-shaped desk, looked up and smiled as he walked through the lobby. "May I help you?"

"Thomas judge to see Dr. Mooney."

She went through the phone routine again and nodded. "Yes, Mr. Judge. Please enter the security center to my rear. They'll direct you from there."

"Before I go in, can I borrow your men's room?"

"Certainly," she said, pointing. "The door on the right beneath the mural."

Hagen thanked her and passed under a massive painting of a futuristic starship soaring between a pair of spectral blue-green planets. He went into a stall, closed the door, and sat down on the toilet. Opening a briefcase, he removed a yellow legal pad and turned to the middle. Then, writing on the upper back of the page, he made a series of tiny cryptic notes and diagrams on the security systems he'd observed since entering the building. A good undercover operative would never put anything down on paper, but Hagen could afford to run fast and loose, knowing the President would bail him out if his cover was blown.