KGB-PC’s disk-drive lights began to flash as the central processing unit, hard disk, and floppy disk began to converse with one another in response to Cole’s command. The screen again went blank before filling with information from the disk. In the upper-right corner of the screen, a photograph of a man appeared; in the upperleft corner, the shield emblem of the KGB became evident. The middle of the screen then filled with an options menu.
He translated the information on the screen and discovered that this was a personnel file for a KGB deepcover agent. The agent, code-named ‘Seagull,’ was a man named Vitali Farkas. The program now offered Cole a look at Farkas’s personal information, career record, medical record, cover history, current assignment, historical assignments, and commendations. It was the complete life of a KGB mole tied up in a neat package.
Cole could barely contain his excitement. Using the information encoded on these diskettes, the CIA might be able to cripple an entire section of the MB’s intelligencegathering operations. In a few hours, Frank Villano was going to be one happy man.
Since it was already 3:30 in the morning, Cole decided to work straight through until 7:00 A.M., when Villano would arrive, and give him the good news personally. In the meantime, he would just continue loading diskettes and browsing through what might be the Who’s Who of Soviet deep-cover agents.
Two hours later, Cole still hadn’t come down from the initial rush of success. He’d previewed and printed out the complete files on ten agents whose assignments, up until 1991, had placed them in sensitive positions around the world.
The next disk Cole slid into the KGB-PC’s disk drive was for an agent code-named ‘Cormorant.’ For the first time, an error message appeared on the screen, interrupting the program. Cole translated the message: ‘File not found.’
The message puzzled Cole; after reading the disks on several agents, why would one suddenly be blank? It was tagged just like the others. Since he had nothing to lose by trying, he pulled the disk out of the KGB-PC and loaded it into the other computer.He then loaded a diskscanning utility to give the Cormorant disk a once-over. Yakushev’s disks had been formatted in a standard DOS environment,Cole reasoned,which meant that there was a good chance that a DOS file utility program might be able to identify and correct the problem.
Sector by sector, the utility program found that the disk was undamaged. Cole then asked the program to look for any unallocated program fragments still present on the disk. The program went back to work and quickly returned after locating eight deleted files on the disk. Someone had erased the disk, but they hadn’t wiped it clean of information. Cormorant’s files were still there; only the directory names had been deleted. Cole immediately set out to recover the lost information.Re-creating the disk directory and file-allocation table took no more than ten minutes.
After completing the file recovery,Cole placed the disk back into the KGB-PC and restarted Yakushev’s program. He sat back in his chair, sipping on a can of soda, waiting for the next Soviet agent to be unveiled. Cole choked in midgulp when the digitized photo appeared in the corner of the screen. The picture, though taken several years ago, bore an uncanny resemblance to Alex Roe.
Cole selected the cover-history option from the menu and, word by word, fed the information into the translation program. What came back confirmed his initial reaction.According to the text, the photograph belonged to a KGB deep-cover agent named Anna Mironova. The agent Cormorant was assigned to the acquisition of scientific and technological information under the cover of a Western journalist, freelance writer Alexandra Roe. The disk left no doubt. Cole had aided a foreign agent in acquiring restricted technology. An overwhelming sense of nausea swept over him.
He sat for several minutes, stunned by the truth about Roe. Gradually, his brain began to thaw from its initial panic and he started sifting through the rest of the Cormorant file. The list of commendations was extensive and, even though Cole didn’t bother to translate all of them, he quickly realized that Roe was a valuable agent.
The last entry in the file was dated August 1991, just a few weeks before the coup attempt. Unlike the other commendation entries, this one had no bold capitalized entry naming the decoration. Instead, it was just a single sentence. Cole typed the entry into the computer and waited for the translation. The entry read: ‘10 August, 1991 Capt. Anna Mironova was killed in an automobile accident while on assignment.’
Cole reread the translation several times. He even retyped it into the computer to double-check it, and the computer returned with the obituary for Mironova.
Cole’s thoughts raced. If Villano was right about KGB record keeping, then the files in Lubyanka might list Mironova’s many honors, but they would say nothing about how she had earned them. Yakushev’s operational files would hold the only detailed account of Mironova’s activities under the alias of Alex Roe, and the only known copy of those files was on this disk. As far as Moscow is concerned,Cole thought,Mironova died over seven years ago. Case closed.
In the midst of his disbelief, Cole made an intuitive leap: If Roe had faked her death in order to escape Moscow’s control, how would her former masters deal with her if they discovered this deception?
A wicked smile curled on his face; the tables had turned. He now possessed information as dangerous to Roe as the Gerty report was to him—information that vastly improved his bargaining position with Roe and her partner. Cole copied Yakushev’s program diskettes and the Cormorant disk onto four blank diskettes of the type that the CIA bought in bulk, then placed the copies inside his briefcase. He then scratched the Mylar surface of the original Cormorant diskette with a paper clip, rendering it unreadable.
HAITI
December 20
‘Shift change,’ Gates’s raspy voice whispered through Kilkenny’s earpiece. Changing of the guards at Masson’s base camp.
Kilkenny repositioned himself and looked through a pair of night-vision binoculars at the camp below. Since passing Masson’s gory marker just over a week ago, the SEALs had tracked and studied the activities in the guerrilla camp.The satellite photos they had used in preparing for this mission showed elements of the compound but gave little feel for how the place worked. That kind of information could only be gathered firsthand. Several days of on-site observation gave the squad the familiarity they needed in order to succeed.
What they discovered about their opposition’s security astounded them. No mines, no trip wires, no booby traps of any kind. The most formidable aspect ofMasson’s defenses was the fear he’d spread over the surrounding villages, a fear that the SEALs did not share. The only protective efforts they detected at the encampment amounted to a few bored men casually patrolling the perimeter. The safety of this remote jungle haven had made Masson’s men lax on their home turf.
Kilkenny set the binoculars down and closed his eyes in a silent prayer. The plan was set and his squad had taken up their positions around the camp. Tonight, they would attack. Kilkenny prayed for the safety of his men.
LITTLE CREEK NAVAL AMPHIBIOUS BASE, VIRGINIA
Dawson walked into the Operations Center and signed into one of the mission observation rooms. The rooms mirrored their larger counterparts in the Pentagon,where senior officers and mission planners watched missions unfold. During World War II, it took days before film footage and reports from the battlefield reached the
