Page 93 of Cry Havoc (Tom Reece #1)
We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.
—JOSEPH CONRAD, HEART OF DARKNESS
THE SAN DIEGO UNION
PUEBLO CREW RELEASED BY N. KOREA
Bucher Leads 81 Men to Freedom After 336 Days
Panmunjom, Korea—The 11-month ordeal of 82 crew members of the U.S. Navy electronic ship Pueblo ended in bitter pre-Christmas cold on the “bridge of no return” this morning.
North Korea released the crew 336 days after the Pueblo was captured for assertedly penetrating her coastal waters on a spying mission.
Cmdr. Lloyd Bucher of San Diego, skipper of the ship, was the first man to walk across the snow-covered bridge between North and South Korea about 6:30 p.m. San Diego time yesterday. It was Monday morning, Korean time.
There will be no Christmas for one member of the crew. Fireman Duane D. Hodges of Creswell, Ore., was killed in an exchange that took place when the Pueblo was boarded. A casket bearing his body was surrendered by the North Koreans.
The State Department said all the men immediately would be given physical examinations and returned to the United States as soon as possible.
The target date is Christmas Day in San Diego, where the crew will be reunited with members of their families, who are flying to San Diego from all over the nation.
East Berlin
German Democratic Republic
December 31, 1968
TOM REECE SAT IN the darkness of the small flat, still chilled from his swim across the Teltow Canal from West to East Berlin.
He had picked the lock to Kirill Dvornikov’s home around 11:00 p.m. He glanced down at his Submariner, now on a stainless-steel bracelet.
It was just before midnight. It would not be much longer now.
He had linked up with his Special Forces contact in West Berlin a week prior. His contact, who went by “James,” had a MACV-SOG rotation under his belt and had worked with Quinn in the early days.
The 39th Special Forces Detachment, known as Det A, was a highly specialized and classified Army Special Forces unit established in 1956 to prepare an unconventional response to a possible war with the Soviet Bloc.
They focused on the sabotage of key installations, setting up cache sites, leading resistance elements, and infiltrating East Germany.
One of those infiltration routes was the Teltow Canal.
The Det A intelligence sergeant had debriefed a man named Hartmut Richter after he swam across the Teltow Canal to freedom from East Berlin in 1966.
Since then, the Detachment had been devising plans to penetrate the Eastern Sector using SCUBA equipment.
They had upcoming training scheduled with the SEAL Teams and West German Kampfschwimmerkompanie on closed-circuit rigs that had not yet come to fruition, so Tom would be on open-circuit for this dive.
That meant surface bubbles, but he assessed that as this was an inaugural mission, East German security would not be attuned to this method of infiltration.
Plus, they were more concerned with people escaping than they were with people breaking in.
Though Det A had not yet sent anyone across on a SCUBA rig, they had the timing down to a science.
They knew exactly when the guards would patrol the opposite bank, where to stop the van on the West German side, how long the operator had to get to the water, how fast they had to get across the canal, and then how long they had to get out of the dry suit, cache it, and move to the linkup with an East German asset.
Det A had drilled it hundreds of times. It just had not yet been operationally tested.
Success had depended on Tom’s ability to swim.
He was given a black Viking Dry Suit and an ASP sidearm, a heavily modified pistol built on a Smith the man who killed my friend.”
“I’ll have you know, I had nothing to do with that.”
“Doesn’t matter. He was working for you.”
“And then you did the same to my colleague.”
“To get our POWs back.”
“You got the crew of the Pueblo.”
Tom indicated that Dvornikov could take off his coat.
“Slowly,” he cautioned.
The GRU man hung the coat on a rack to the right of the door.
“May I sit?” he asked.
“Please.”
Dvornikov pulled a chair from a small round kitchen table and positioned it facing his adversary.
“That’s close enough,” Tom said. “Keep your hands in your lap.”
Dvornikov sat and did as he was told.
“I got here early enough to look around. I’d have to imagine your flat in Paris was a little more to your liking.”
“It was. Here my view is of a neighbor’s brick wall.”
“Better than the gulag.”
“Quite. I feel like this conversation will go better if I can smoke.”
“By all means.”
Dvornikov reached slowly into his coat pocket and removed a pack of cigarettes and a small book of matches.
“KAROs. I prefer the Cabinets, but these damn lung torpedoes were all the pub had available tonight.”
Dvornikov struck a match and lit his cigarette.
He offered Tom one from the white and black pack.
Tom shook his head.
“Thomas, may I call you Thomas?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued, “These poor Berliners; they survived Allied bombing raids, the Battle of Berlin, the Berlin Airlift, and the Wall in ’61, to say nothing of the winter weather.
I don’t blame them for being perpetually depressed.
Do you find it ironic that the central standoff of the Cold War was built on the ashes of a hot one? ”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“It’s folly personified. Berlin is the front line of our ideological battle for supremacy, where the two great powers meet.”
“I bet your potential recruits eat that up.”
“Your German is very good.”
“I get by.”