Gone Tomorrow

‘Like what?’

‘Whatever needed doing. For whoever needed it done. Not just the army. Delta guys were loaned out, from time to time. To the CIA, on occasion.’

‘To do what?’

‘Covert interventions. Coups. Assassinations.’

‘Marshal Tito died in 1980. In Yugoslavia. You think Sansom did that?’

‘No, I think Tito got sick. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a back-up plan, in case he stayed healthy.’

‘Brezhnev died in 1982. In Russia. The Andropov, pretty soon after that. Then Chernenko, real quick. It was like an epidemic.’

‘What are you? A historian?’

‘Amateur. But whatever, all that led to Gorbachev, and progress. You think that was us? You think that was Sansom?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘But whatever, none of that kind of stuff relates to March of 1983 in Afghanistan.’

‘But think about it. Stumbling into a Soviet sniper team in the dark was a totally random chance. Would they have sent a go-to ace like Sansom walking around in the hills, hoping for the best? A hundred times out of a hundred and one he would have come up empty. That’s a massive risk for very little reward. That’s no kind of mission planning. A mission needs an achievable objective.’

‘A lot of them fail.’

‘Of course they do. But they all start out with a realistic target. More realistic than blundering around in a thousand square miles of empty mountains hoping for a random face to face encounter. So there must have been something else going on.’

‘That’s pretty vague.’

‘There’s more,’ I said. ‘And it’s not so vague. People have been talking to me for days. And I’ve been listening. Some of what I heard doesn’t make much sense. Those federal guys snarled me up at the Watergate in D.C. I asked them what was going on. Their reaction was weird. It was like the sky was about to fall. It was way out of proportion for some technical trespass twenty-five years ago.’

‘Geopolitics isn’t simple.’

‘I agree. And I’m the first to admit I’m no kind of an expert. But even so it seemed way over the top.’

‘That’s still vague.’

‘I spoke to Sansom in D.C. At his office. He seemed sour about the whole thing. Gloomy, and kind of troubled.’

‘It’s election season.’

‘But grabbing up the rifle was kind of cool, wasn’t it? Nothing to be ashamed of. It was all about what the army used to call dash and daring. So his reaction was wrong.’

‘Still vague.’

‘He knew the sniper’s name. Grigori Hoth. From his dog tags. I figured he had the tags as souvenirs. He said, no, those tags were locked up with the after-action reports and everything else. It was like a slip of the tongue. And everything else? What did that mean?’

Lee said nothing.

I said, ‘We talked about the fate of the sniper and the spotter. Sansom said he had no silenced weapons. Which was like another slip of the tongue. Delta would never set up for clandestine nighttime incursions without silenced weapons. They’re particular about stuff like that. Which suggests to me that the whole VAL episode was an accidental byproduct of something else entirely. I thought the rifle was the story. But this thing is like an iceberg. Most of it is still hidden.’

Lee said nothing.

I said, ‘Then we talked about the geopolitics. He saw a danger, for sure. He’s worried about Russia, or the Russian Federation, or whatever it is they call themselves now. He thinks they’re unstable. He said things could blow up big, if the Korengal part of the story gets out. You hear that? The Korengal part of the story? It was like a third slip of the tongue. It was effectively a direct admission that there’s more. Direct from the horse’s mouth.’

Lee didn’t answer. Jacob Mark asked, ‘What kind of more?’

‘I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s information-intensive. Right from the start Lila Hoth was looking for a USB memory. And the feds assume there’s one out there somewhere. They said their task is to recover the real memory stick. Real, because they took a look at the one I bought and assumed it was a decoy. They said, it’s empty and it’s too small anyway. Hear that? Too small? Which means there are some big files in play. Lots of information.’

‘But Susan didn’t have anything with her.’

‘True. But everybody assumes she did.’

‘What kind of in format ion?’

‘I have no idea. Except that Springfield talked to me here in New York. Sansom’s security guy, at the Sheraton. In a quiet corridor. He was very uptight. He was warning me off. He chose a specific metaphor. He said, you can’t afford to turn over the wrong rock.’

‘So?’

‘What happens when you turn over a rock?’

‘Things crawl out.’

‘Exactly. Present tense. Things crawl out. This is not about things just lying there, that died twenty-five years ago. This is about things that are squirming and wriggling right now. This is about things that are alive today.’

I saw Theresa Lee thinking it through. She glanced at the phone on the night table. Her eyes narrowed. I guessed she was rehearsing the morning call to Sansom. She said, ‘He’s kind of careless, isn’t he? He made three slips of the tongue.’