Forbidden Area Read online

  Then he drove on to his own house, three blocks away. He couldn’t get to sleep until dawn.

  2

  The driver of the Buick sedan, headed south on AIA, was born Stanislaus Lazinoff in Smolensk, but for two years he had been trained to think of himself as Stanley Smith, American, born in Glebe City, Iowa. The choice of birthplace, like everything else in his manufactured past, was no accident. The courthouse at Glebe City had burned to the ground, along with all its records, some years before. An account of the fire had appeared in the Chicago papers, and had been clipped and forwarded to Moscow by a farsighted agent of what was then the NKVD, attached to the Russian consulate in a clerical post.

  Stanley Smith was a stocky, thick-chested, handsome man with close-cropped, sandy hair and intelligent gray eyes. He was in his early thirties but looked younger. Indeed, all his credentials, including his driving license and Social Security card, asserted he was twenty-nine, this being considered a more suitable age for his exact role. He and his companions were very special people, the end result of a scientific experiment utilizing the Pavlov-Lysenko theories of conditioned reflexes. A new environment had been painstakingly grafted on personalities of unquestionable and fanatic loyalty to the state. An American body and mind had been synthetically created, while the heart remained Russian.

  Stanley Smith was a second generation Communist. His father, a soldier in the Czar’s Army, had led the mutiny of a regiment in Leningrad, then St. Petersburg. Unfortunately his father worshipped the Army leader Trotsky, and had died suddenly and mysteriously. Stalin himself had helped carry the Lazinoff coffin, a clear indication that Stanley’s father, while misguided, was still an old Bolshevik hero.

  At the age of sixteen Stanley enlisted in the Red Army for the Fatherland War, mistakenly called World War II by Western historians. Even then he knew it was no true world war—but one was coming. During the storming of Berlin, as the youngest lieutenant of engineers in Zhukov’s armies, he performed deft and daring feats with explosives that won him two Red Stars, promotion, and marked him for the future.

  When he was twenty-five, and a major attached to the Army intelligence service in Budapest, he was recalled for special schooling. For five years, in Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev, he attended agitprop, espionage, and counter-intelligence schools, and became proficient in such esoteric branches of military knowledge as silent killing and cryptography. He took language courses and studied English and American history. He crammed the fundamentals of nuclear physics, and the basics of biological warfare.

  A major military operation is the most complex undertaking yet attempted by man. It may be recalled that the planning for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy in June, 1944, was begun by a British staff four years earlier. Stanley was to participate in something infinitely more ambitious, the subjugation of a powerful nation with one massive blow. Just as a jet bomber must be on the drawing boards five to ten years before it can be launched against the enemy, so a human weapon must be prepared with equal thoroughness. This is particularly true if the humans mission is likely to be of critical importance. So Stanley’s education was still not complete. He was sent to a place that its inhabitants and a few people on the General Staff called, jokingly, “Little Chicago.”

  Little Chicago was laid out in a section of the Ukraine so thoroughly and often devastated by draught, famine, and war that it was necessary to evacuate only a few kulaks to clear an area of a hundred square miles. This reservation was barricaded by mine fields, electrically charged wire, and watchtowers. In its center was erected a town in microcosm. Except that it nested in no suburbs and farmland and all its buildings were new, externally it could have been Glebe City, Iowa.

  The concept behind the training of Stanley Smith and his companions was as old, in warfare, as the Trojan Horse. Something of the kind had been tried, spectacularly but without success, by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. A battalion of English-speaking soldiers had been dressed in American uniforms and infiltrated through the lines to spread confusion and seize bridges in Bradley’s rear. The Germans, usually so methodical, had not had time for adequate preparation and training. The Red Army did not intend to make the same mistake.

  For two years Stanley Smith lived in Little Chicago, speaking only English, reading only American newspapers, magazines, and books. Three nights a week he attended an American movie in a replica of an American theater, complete with popcorn and soft drink machines. He not only learned to play baseball, but developed into a passable shortstop. He listened to the World Series on short wave, and could quote batting averages.

  He took a course in American television and radio. Every Tuesday afternoon he listened to recordings, and watched kinescopes, of the most popular programs. He learned to identify the voices and faces of Eddie Fisher, Liberace, Jackie Gleason, Edward R. Murrow, and Lucille Ball. Some of the comedy programs, in which laughter was heard when nothing was funny, he found entirely incomprehensible. But he was assured by his tutor, a Hungarian who had worked for several years at the Ford plant in Detroit, that his reaction was quite normal.

  He drew his pay in dollars. He learned the value of American clothing, and the variety of purchases that could be made in drugstores. He learned to buy, cook, and enjoy American food. He absorbed American poker, which is more conservative than Russian poker, and discovered gin rummy and craps. He acquired a taste for bourbon. He studied the history and geography of the United States until he was, unknowingly, better informed on these subjects than most American high school graduates. He could even name the members of the President’s Cabinet.

  Only a small proportion of the population was receiving training. Most of the people were members of the permanent staff, the housekeeping detail, and instructors. He was certain that many of the men were in the Osoby Otdel, the military security system that was called, or whispered, O.O. Among the special tutors were Czechs, Rumanians, Poles, Letts, and even a few Russians who had lived in America. There were Germans, graduates of the Abwehr and Gestapo, skilled in techniques of espionage. There were women, of course. They were there in the capacity of instructors as well as for morale and convenience. The emotional language of love may be the same the world over, but the colloquialisms and subtleties of the boudoir differ.

  He lived in an apartment with men he knew as Gregg Palmer, Ralph Masters, and William Johnson. It was obvious that their backgrounds were much like his own, but they never revealed their Russian names. On orders, when you entered Little Chicago you forgot your past. It was an important psychological factor in the creation of a new personality. These four had stayed together from the moment they entered Little Chicago. They were a team, their mission one.

  In their first week of training the four had been supplied with American credentials and were constantly tested in their uses until their new identities were fused in their minds. While Stanley Smith had been born in Iowa, he noted that he was now a resident of Florida. Since he was a man of considerable strategic knowledge and active imagination, this gave him a clue to their mission long before their first official briefing. He wasn’t being sent to Florida because of the climate or because any vital industrial complex existed there. Florida’s military importance lay in the air. Florida was one big landing field, a center of air bases. There was the Navy Station in Jacksonville, with its statellite fields and its companion carrier base at Mayport. But more important were the great bases of the Strategic Air Command. There was Pinecastle in Orlando and Mac Dill in Tampa and Eglin in Pensacola and the gigantic new Hibiscus Field which had recently been described in the news magazines. Why they were located in Florida was understandable. The flying weather was almost always good, and Florida was about as far from Russia as you could get and still stay on the continent of North America. Distance gave the Florida bases an immunity not enjoyed by SAC bases elsewhere. He would bet his bottom dollar (he used the phrase often) that his target would be one of those bases. But he did not mention what he suspected. Sile
nce never sent a man to Siberia.

  In his last month of schooling Stanley Smith was examined by a board of three visitors. One of them, Smith was fairly certain, was a native American, although he could not be sure. He was asked some pretty tricky questions, such as who invented the airplane and the electric light. He found that he had almost forgotten they were invented by Mozkaiski and Lodygin, respectively, and promptly gave the answers he knew were wanted: the Wright brothers and Thomas A. Edison. He also received a physical checkup and it was discovered that some dental work was necessary. An incisor was pulled and replaced by a shining stainless steel tooth. The dentist, new to Little Chicago, muttered in Russian. It was the first Russian Smith had heard in two years and he was forced to translate it, in his head, into English. A man’s transformation is complete when he does his thinking in an alien tongue.

  Ordinarily, the road out of Little Chicago never doubled back through Russia, a necessary security precaution. In the case of Stanley Smith and his three companions there had been a deviation from normal procedures because of the peculiar nature and importance of their mission. They were flown to Moscow, taken inside the Kremlin walls, and lodged in an office-apartment annex, once barracks. That they were guarded like prisoners, and that security officers slept in their rooms, ate with them, and even eavesdropped in the toilets, did not seem unusual to Smith. All his life he had been watched. Sometimes, as in Budapest, his duty had been to watch others. Only in this way could the state be protected. It was normal, or, as he now said, S.O.P.

  In the Kremlin they were introduced to an American—a genuine, Texas-born American—of whom they had been told. They had been warned that this American was erratic, and at times might seem crazy, but that they should be respectful to him, and listen carefully to anything he had to say. He was a great prize. He had been a sergeant in the Strategic Air Command, at a base in England. He had defected to the East while on tourist leave in Vienna. Because of a woman, it was said. His name was Horgan and he was a thin, red-faced, nervous man of about Smith’s age. He wore the uniform of the Red Air Force and the epaulets of a colonel, which was not surprising when one considered that in all Russia he was the only man who knew SAC intimately, as a child knows his father’s house.

  In the week that followed, Smith and the others were closeted with Horgan for many hours. Their conferences were held in a comfortable, unmilitary room furnished with leather chairs, with caviar and cheeses always on the table, and liquor, much liquor. Sometimes Horgan grew excitable, and rambled. Sometimes he digressed in tirades at the brass and the officer clique which had refused to recognize his abilities and commission him. Sometimes he cursed, by name, officers who he said had conspired against him. He had even been reduced to KP, when such duty was allowable punishment. Once he quoted from a letter he had written his congressman. Once he broke down and put his head on the table and wept and announced that his wife was no better than an embarcadero whore. She had divorced him while he was in England, and was remarried, now, to a lieutenant. Yet what he had to say about the inner workings of a SAC base, and its security system, was clear enough and had the ring of truth in it. Horgan’s ideas were ingenious, and his advice explicit, but Smith wondered how long he would be allowed to live. Not long, surely, after he had been pumped dry and began to repeat himself and got on the nerves of the O.O. agents who guarded him and the intelligence officers who fawned on him, and dressed him in the trappings of a colonel, while despising him.

  The final briefing for Smith, Palmer, Masters, and Johnson was delivered by a general of the Red Air Force, a Hero of the Soviet Union. The general emphasized timing. They must always remember that their mission was only a small part of a larger plan. At the same time their assignment was vital. Unless they succeeded, there might be no larger plan. They were essential as a tiny jewel in the heart of a watch. The general had no doubt that one, at least, would succeed. If only one succeeded, the names of all four would live forever in the history of the world revolution. They would be greater than Stakhanov. They would enjoy privileges and honors, upon their return, such as no young men had ever received before.

  They would enter the United States with funds more than sufficient for their mission. They must be careful with their money as with their tongues, for a display of money could attract attention and betray them. If they ran into trouble, they were on no account to contact the Russian embassy or the consulates and thus compromise the diplomatic situation. Nor must they approach any American Communist, for the Party in the United States was riddled with spies and unreliable. In great emergency, there was one man who had been instructed to assist them. The name of this man, his address, and the manner in which he could be approached would be communicated to them before the landing. Also, in case of a shift in timing or change in orders, this man would contact them. He was to be trusted. Whenever they changed address, this man was to be informed. The general had then smiled and said he was now turning them over to the Navy. He had shaken hands with each of them, and wished them good luck.

  The voyage from the naval base at Tallin required nineteen days. The submarine was a new 3,000 tonner, designed along the lines of the French Surcouf, with comfortable living quarters, a hangar, and a catapult. The hangar could accommodate four large guided missiles or two jet aircraft, so it received a landing barge with ease. Inside the landing barge was a car. In the car’s luggage compartment were five suitcases, four filled with the essential tools of their job, concealed under lightweight clothing, one filled with money.

  They were chaperoned, on this voyage, by two dour O.O. men and an uncommunicative, thin, gray-faced man, much older, who represented the MVD, or perhaps the Presidium itself. On their last day at sea, this man called them into the captain’s cabin, which he had occupied since the voyage began. He spoke to them in Russian, repeating much of what the Air general had told them in the Kremlin. Then he gave them the name and address of Robert Gumol, a banker in Upper Hyannis, a suburb of Philadelphia. They had only to tell Gumol, “I am from Five-Star Electric” to establish their identity. Smith was at first surprised that a banker should be an agent, but the more he thought about it the more he was impressed by the cleverness of his superiors. In the United States bankers were the most respected and conservative group in a community. Bankers handled large sums of money as a matter of routine. And a bank’s doors were open to all, and in a bank’s inner offices private and personal discussions were usual.

  Only one small incident disturbed Stanley Smith during the landing. The navigator of the submarine was not a Russian, but a German, a former officer of the German Navy. This man, Karl Schiller, was chosen for the mission because he had been a Leutnant on a U-boat that had landed eight German saboteurs at exactly the same spot, on the same coast, in 1942. Schiller and Smith both enjoyed chess and they had become friendly, and Schiller had sometimes invited Smith topside for a breath of fresh air and a glimpse of the stars when they ran on the surface, nights. Schiller often related, with pride, the details of the previous voyage. It had been a much more difficult undertaking, he assured Smith, with the British and American navies to dodge and the coast itself patrolled. Now it would be simple, with the world basking in peace.

  It was Schiller who commanded the landing craft in its run for the beach, and it had been Schiller who ran down the beach to the car and shook his hand. At that moment Smith asked a question that had been troubling him. “By the way,” he said, “you never told me what happened to the sabotage team.”

  Schiller had smiled and said, “Oh, I forgot. They were all caught and executed.”

  It was hardly a pleasant way to bid one goodbye, Smith thought as he drove through the night. It could shake a man, until you considered that it had been wartime, and the eight Germans probably had not been so thoroughly conditioned as he, Palmer, Masters, and Johnson.

  The speedometer crept past sixty and Palmer, sitting next to him, said, “Hey, Stan, slow down. Florida law is sixty by day but only fifty by night. Re
member?” Palmer was the most cautious of the four.

  Smith slowed, although he was confident that there were no cops on the road at this hour. Anyway, back in Little Chicago they had even schooled him not to panic when stopped by the police. It had been a hard thing to learn, but he was ready to test it.

  In St. Augustine Smith pulled into an all-night filling station and said, “Fill ’er up with high test.”

  The attendant, alert despite the hour, filled the tank and checked under the hood. He whistled and said, “Say, lucky I looked. Your battery water’s way down.” He immediately filled the battery with distilled water, without instructions. Then he wiped the windshield. Smith was impressed with this service and efficiency. He wondered whether all travellers received such service, or whether it was only because the Buick was new and large. He realized that there was still much to learn about America. He had not been told everything.

  The attendant said, “Three eighty-four, please,” and Smith handed him a five dollar bill. The attendant noted that the four men in the car all wore bright sport shirts. The license prefix was 2-W, which meant Duval County. Four young guys from Jacksonville, he thought, away from their wives for a big weekend in Miami, or maybe a fishing trip down on the Keys.

  Smith pocketed the change and drove on. He felt elated. For the first time he had encountered an American on American soil, and had passed inspection.

  Just before dawn they pulled off the road and split up the money in the extra suitcase. Smith realized that even by American standards all four were rich men. The thought occurred to him that once they dispersed in Miami his companions could take their money, lose themselves in this fat, careless country where security controls were almost non-existent and a man could travel at will, and enjoy life. In America it was not necessary to register with the police, not anywhere, nor were permits required for work, or for purchasing luxury goods. But he doubted that the others would be tempted. Like himself, they were responsible and dedicated men. Also, one day there would come an accounting, for one day the Marx-Lenin ideal would stand supreme over all nations, united in the comradeship of proletarian order and peace.