Black Ghosts by Victor Ostrovsky Read Free Book Online Page B

unexpected obstacles along the route.
    The motorcade slowed as it approached First and 52nd. A black-and-white patrol car had already secured the intersection. McPhee was running three black-and-whites on duty this morning, verifying that one was always at the next intersection as the motorcade approached it.
    â€œSo far, so good,” McPhee snarled at his driver.
    â€œYep,” answered the driver, unwilling to say anything that could ignite the captain’s extremely short fuse. Besides, there was little else to say. It was a standard security operation, and it was proceeding as planned.
    McPhee nodded. If it hadn’t been for his nagging toothache and that obnoxious little Russian security chief—“call me Boris”—McPhee could easily have graded this morning as okay. But his tooth did ache and Boris—well, Boris was a pain too. He hadn’t liked the man from the get-go, he thought, scratching his bull-like neck. Something wasn’t quite right about him, not wanting to ride in the limo with the general. Giving that lame excuse about Russian security protocol. Protocol my ass, thought McPhee, the general probably doesn’t like him either. McPhee had the misfortune to work with Russians before, but this guy took the cake.
    Barely half an hour ago, at 2:30 in the morning, the general’s conference had ended. From McPhee’s point of view, the timing couldn’t have been better. The city that never sleeps was numb, its asphalt arteries not yet clogged by traffic. They could take the Queensboro Bridge on their way out to LaGuardia Airport, rather than using one of the tunnels. McPhee disliked tunnels; if something went wrong in a tunnel, you were trapped like a rat in a drainpipe. Not that he was expecting anything to go wrong. His cargo, he’d been told, was a popular guy, both here and back in Russia. Still, there were too many agencies involved for McPhee’s liking. He preferred to work alone, knowing all the angles. He ran his finger around his neck. The shirt collar was too tight. He loosened his tie. “Fuck ‘em,” he said, bringing a cautious grin to his driver’s face.
    General Kozov settled comfortably into the soft leather upholstery of the limousine. Things had turned out very well.
    The conference produced most, if not all, of what both sides had expected. President Konyigin had made it very clear to him that neither side wanted total nuclear disarmament. “For a start,” the president had said, “safe disposal of nuclear warheads is far more expensive than keeping them poised for action, and not nearly as reassuring.” He had talked to the veteran soldier about the “what if” factor: What if some Third World upstart got a hold of a bomb and decided to play cards with the big boys? “No,” Kozov could hear the president saying, “disarmament is definitely not an option.”
    So they came up with the next best thing: trust and verify, as the old Russian proverb went, or as his American counterpart had said, “In God we trust; everybody else pays cash, baby.”
    What this translated to in practice was the deployment of several hundred Russian technicians who would be seated at computer consoles in all American strategic command posts, such as the Strategic Air Command Center, known simply as SAC, near Omaha, Nebraska. The technicians would be keeping a lookout for any targeting changes for the intercontinental ballistic missiles, referred to as ICBMs in the tedious documents the general had to read over the last several days. The technicians would be patched into the central computer, and as long as the readout confirmed that no missiles were set to land anywhere on the territory of the Confederation of Independent States, life went on as usual. At three hundred and seven locations, more than a thousand people would keep their eyes open and fixed on the screens, one shift after another, twenty-four