Home Goes The Warrior (37 page)

George lifted the camera he’d been carrying on a strap around his neck and started taking his pictures. Slowly he walked around the room, snapping pictures of every item. Suddenly, just past the conference table, he stopped, looking into an open closet. “Wow.” He took several pictures of the open closet, then he reached in and pulled out a rifle. “It’s a Springfield Model 1903, the sniper rifle that our troops used in both World Wars. It’s in great shape, from the looks of it.” Holding it in the cradle of his arm, he worked the bolt action and a glistening bullet flew out onto the floor. Bending over, he picked it up. “A 30-06! We need to bag and tag this thing. I’ve got a feeling that it’s going to be evidence in a murder trial.”

When he was done taking his pictures, he went out to the porch and addressed the agents behind the cars. “People, we’ve defused three bombs. But there’s still a bunch of them in here. We’re going to have to find and disarm all of them before I risk letting any of you in the house. If the bomb squad will join the two inside, they’ll receive instructions from them. The rest of you scatter and set up a perimeter around this house. No one goes in or out. As soon as I can get some guards in here, I’ll let you go back to your home offices. When the bombs are all deactivated, we’ll get some of you back here. Any questions?” No one spoke up, so George had them take up guard positions.

George was about to go back into the home when a breathless agent approached him. “Mr. Gold, you need to see what the gardener just showed us. There’s an old graveyard back there. Must go back to colonial times, I’d say. But there’s six newer graves there. Three of them have headstones saying they’re the graves of Old Man Symington’s wife
and parents. But separated from the main graveyard are three newer mounds of dirt that look like graves. They aren’t marked. Looks like either a Potter’s Field or a dump site of some kind.”

George followed the agent across the huge lawn and back into the trees. After a while, they got to the old graveyard. It was exactly as the agent had described. The original graveyard, where the Symington family was buried, was scrupulously maintained. But back about twenty feet into the trees was a group of dirt mounds that were scattered haphazardly between the trees, in no particular order. They were unmarked. George went from one to another, taking pictures of them all. “It looks like they were dug wherever there was soft dirt and no tree roots. I think Randall and his crew may have just made our jobs very easy.” He didn’t explain his remark.

George went back to his car and placed a radio call directly to Attorney General Saxton. Within two hours, two big green helicopters disgorged their cargo of Marines from Camp Lejeune. The entire area, mansion and grounds was sealed and kept that way as the experts searched the mansion for every detail of the operation.

The federal coroner, brought in to exhume the three graves, actually found five bodies in them. All of them had died execution-style with bullet holes in the back of their heads. Four of the five had no identification and were tentatively identified as Mexican or Central American immigrants. The fifth body was that of a teen-aged boy who had disappeared two years earlier from his nearby home after saying he was going for a walk. He had never been found, in spite of a huge neighborhood search and a great deal of publicity on the case.

Lee had opened the briefcase with the radio in it and turned it on. It was hidden under his desk so casual visitors wouldn’t see it, but he kept it on. He didn’t want to miss the alert when it came. As a result, he received the “Big Bird” message from Tom at the same time as the FBI agents in the van outside his office did. He was waiting for them
when they came through the door. There were six agents, three women and three men.

Lee led the way back, gesturing to the women agents as they passed the vault. Then he continued on with the male agents, heading for Thomas Sloan’s office in the rear of the building.

The female agents wasted no time taking Sheila down. She didn’t appear to resist as they came around her desk and grabbed her arms. With her head forced down on the desk and her hands being handcuffed behind her, it didn’t appear that she had any ability to resist. But the agents didn’t notice that her knee was planted firmly on a button under her desk, sending the signal that she and Thomas had installed years before. It was designed to trigger a transmitter that would warn the others in the family that danger was imminent. It caused a sharp vibration in a bracelet all of them wore continuously. But today, although all four bracelets vibrated, only Thomas was in a position for it to be of benefit.

The three women agents closed the door and stripped Sheila, doing what was necessary to ensure that she had no cyanide anywhere on her person. Then they clothed her in a prisoner’s jump suit and waited for the male agents to return.

Sheila Novak, aka Shura Novikov, was in custody.

Thomas received the warning signal’s vibration as he was walking back from a routine trip to a ship in drydock. He was still about a half-mile from the office when the vibrating started. This had happened once before, when Shura had accidentally bumped the little button. But this time it didn’t stop right away. Thomas moved over between two buildings so that he was less noticeable and stopped to think.

He wasn’t sure if there was an emergency or not. But there was no way to check except to go to the office and see if Shura was there or not. He was carrying the little .38 Special that he always kept under his loose trousers, unnoticeable among the rolls of fat there. His pills were in his jacket pocket, so he was ready for whatever happened. He
began to steadily work his way back to the office, staying as unobtrusive as possible.

He was behind a row of cars outside the building next to the combat systems office when he saw strangers come out of its front door. He shrank back into the shadow of a bus stop and waited. The strangers looked around and motioned for others inside to come out. Then they walked to a big cargo van that was parked across the street and opened the back doors. Now three women came out the door. Shura was with them, dressed in prison orange!

Thomas stiffened at the sight. He knew that he couldn’t let Shura be taken alive. None of them were ever to be taken alive! Papa had drilled that into them for years. Briefly the thought passed through his mind that they must have caught Shura by surprise. She would have gone like her sister had if she’d had the chance.

That god damned lieutenant and his red-headed buddy were coming out of the building right behind the women! The lieutenant was shaking hands with another man, apparently the leader of the strangers. He had brought this on them. That was the final straw for Thomas.

Lying on the ground behind the bus stop’s wooden enclosure, he could see them milling around and talking in front of him. Taking the little .38 out, Thomas aimed it under the enclosure at his primary target. Carefully, as Papa had taught him so many years ago, he squeezed the trigger. The sharp
“crack”
of the pistol almost startled him, but he saw his target go down. Swiftly he switched to his secondary target and fired. But the Lieutenant and his friends had dodged back into the doorway, and Thomas’s bullet bounced harmlessly off the bricks beside the building entrance.

The lieutenant stuck his head out with a gun in his hand and Thomas shot again. He missed. That was his last shot. All six FBI agents were firing by now and Thomas had no chance of escaping that wall of lead.

Lee saw Thomas’s body jerking and he knew this was over. He ran to the back of the van where a female agent had already started working on Sheila. The agent looked up as he approached. “She’s going to be all right, Lieutenant. He hit her in the hip, not anything life-threatening. She’ll be alive to tell us her story, for sure.”

Lee left her and walked to where two of the men were rolling Thomas’s body over. “This one’s not so lucky, Lee. He got hit at least three times, all in the head. Couldn’t see anything but his head to shoot at, the way he was lying on the ground there.”

Thomas Sloan, aka Toma Sokolov, was dead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - PEACE AT LAST

ee and Tom sat to the rear of the group in the big White House Situation Room. Both men were totally ill at ease. The National Security Council was about to commence a meeting at the long table in front of them, a meeting chaired by the President himself. Neither Lee or Tom had ever participated in such a high-level gathering before this. Lee was wearing his full dress white uniform, complete with his brand-new lieutenant commander shoulder boards. Tom was in his best three-piece suit. Neither man could figure out why they were there.

The President called the meeting to order. “All right, let’s get started. As some of you already know, it’s been three months to the day since we uncovered one of the largest espionage efforts to ever happen on American soil. Because of that incident, we had to take many actions to alleviate the threat and cancel out the damages as best we could. We’ll be recovering from this disaster for years, but I want to make sure that we’re all in synch and heading in the same direction. That’s why I called this meeting. I want each of you who have been involved in this situation to briefly summarize the actions taken to date and all planned future actions related to this. Please hold your questions until the presentations are complete.”

The President looked around the room, then spoke again. “First person up will be the Attorney General. Mr. Saxton, if you will start us off with a summary from your perspective?”

Bill Saxton stood and moved to a screen at the end of the table. Signaling to a camera operator, he began with a description of the events leading up to the capture of first the Skimmers and later the Symington group. This portion of his screen presentation was mostly in outline form, interspersed with some pictures of the shipyard, the Skimmer’s burned-out row house, the mansion, and the Symington family. He was effusive in his praise of the efforts of both Tom and Lee, a fact that caused them to shrink, embarrassed, into their chairs. Then he began telling the audience about the events that had occurred since the Marines had sealed the mansion. The two sat up straighter. There had been a complete blackout of news since that day. They were curious to find out what had happened since then.

The Attorney General’s screen presentation from here on was mostly pictures of the various equipment that had been captured. “From here, I’ll be discussing the actions that have been taken in the past three months in a joint effort by the Justice Department and the CIA. Mr. Dolby will help me out with his agency’s involvement as we go along. We’re working this together, so the story is best told by us jointly.” He paused, and Bill Dolby commented that this was the best way to address the ongoing actions. The President nodded, and the Attorney General continued speaking.

“Well, the old mansion turned out to be a treasure trove for both the CIA and the FBI. We put our best talent to work in an effort that had teams of specialists inspect, analyze, and disassemble all of the electronics, as well as the security apparatus, in the building. The equipment was the most complete set of spy communications equipment we have ever seen anywhere. It could handle every medium, from film to pictures to microfiche to the spoken word. The signals from this equipment suite were scrambled and coded in a variety of ways. Analyzing this suite gave us a great deal of insight into Soviet communications and coding methodologies.”