The Charm School

is passing from northeast to southwest. Very nice, sunny summer day. That’s wheat there. Let’s move in a little.” The image on the screen zoomed in to a close-up of a man on a red tractor pulling a load of hay. “Now there’s the Moskva River coming up.”
    The picture seemed to be taken at about two thousand feet, Hollis thought, though the satellite could have been a hundred miles above the earth.
    Alevy continued, “All right, you see the beginning of the pine forest. Now you see what you saw from the ground—a cleared ring about fifty meters in depth, and if you look closely you can see the concentric rings of barbed wire. There… see the watchtower.” Alevy stopped the tape and focused even closer. “The Border Guard chap in the tower is scratching his ass, and unbeknownst to him, the eye in the sky is recording it for posterity.”
    Hollis asked, “When was this taken?”
    “This past June. Okay, moving toward the center of the installation—we see more pine trees and not much else. But hold on here—” He stopped the tape again. “Now look at the top of the screen. That clearing is a helipad. See the way the grass is blown by the rotor blades, and see the chopperskid indents on the ground?”
    “No.”
    “Well, neither do I. But that’s what the photo analysts told me. Okay, move on a few seconds, and there we see just a piece of a structure, a log cabin, but you won’t see much else because of the evergreen cover. The Soviets like to use their pine forests as cover from our satellites. One day this whole fucking country will be hidden under the evergreens. Okay, now you see the beginning of Borodino Field, then the old Minsk–Moscow road, then the new Minsk–Moscow highway. Pretty nifty, huh? The Soviets must shit when they think about our satellites.” Alevy shut off the video. “That’s it.”
    Both men sat in the semidarkness awhile. Alevy said, “We did spectrum and infrared analysis on the pine forest. There are heat sources and such down there. Vehicles, people, lots of small structures, and a few larger ones, mostly wood, we think, scattered about in that square mile. Population anywhere from four to eight hundred hot bodies, though the place could hold more. In fact, it probably did once.”
    Hollis said, “There are about three hundred American POWs there.”
    Alevy looked at him quickly. “How do you know that?”
    “The French woman told me. Fisher told her, Dodson told him.”
    Alevy nodded. “We contacted her in Helsinki, but she wasn’t talking.” Alevy asked, “Anything else?”
    “What you already know. Former Red Air Force school, now a KGB school.”
    Alevy rubbed his chin. “Three hundred?”
    Hollis nodded.
    “Jesus Christ.”
    “That was my general reaction.”
    Alevy looked at Hollis. “Am I thoroughly briefed now?”
    “You are. Am I?”
    Alevy said, “Well, you can guess the rest, Sam. These are not defectors, of course, but POWs from ’Nam. They were given to the Russians by the North Vietnamese, probably in payment for those neat surface-to-air missiles that knocked you guys down. They got the product of their missiles. Live American fliers. Quid pro quo.”
    Hollis nodded.
    Alevy continued, “There are… what? A thousand fliers still unaccounted for? The North Viets thought of them as nothing more than POWs to be beaten, starved, and paraded in front of news cameras. The Russians thought of them as a valuable resource for the Red Air Force.”
    Hollis stood. “Yes, and they opened a Red Air Force training school with their potential enemy as instructors. We always suspected that.”
    Alevy asked, “Would these American pilots have been of real military value? What’s your professional opinion on that?”
    Hollis replied, “I’ll tell you a military secret because I like you. The Israelis in the past have given us captured, Soviet-trained Egyptian and Syrian pilots. Using drugs and hypnosis, we were able to reproduce a good deal of the Soviet Air Force jet fighter school curriculum.”
    “Okay, but what good would that do as the aircraft and tactics change?”
    “Not much if you haven’t engaged the enemy during a particular period of time. The hardware and tactics change, as you say.”
    “So,” Alevy asked, “what are those Vietnam-era pilots doing there
now
, Sam? They were used to train MiG pilots fifteen, sixteen years ago. Now they’re useless. Why not dispose of them? What good are they
now
? That is the question. Do