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In the Kremlin they were introduced to an American--a genuine, Texas-born American--of whom they had been told. They had been warned that this American was erratic, and at times might seem crazy, but that they should be respectful to him, and listen carefully to anything he had to say. He was a great prize. He had been a sergeant in the Strategic Air Command, at a base in England. He had defected to the East while on tourist leave in Vienna. Because of a woman, it was said. His name was Horgan and he was a thin, red-faced, nervous man of about Smith's age. He wore the uniform of the Red Air Force and the epaulets of a colonel, which was not surprising when one considered that in all Russia he was the only man who knew SAC intimately, as a child knows his father's house.

In the week that followed, Smith and the others were closeted with Horgan for many hours. Their conferences were held in a comfortable, unmilitary room furnished with leather chairs, with caviar and cheeses always on the table, and liquor, much liquor. Sometimes Horgan grew excitable, and rambled. Sometimes he digressed in tirades at the brass and the officer clique which had refused to recognize his abilities and commission him. Sometimes he cursed, by name, officers who he said had conspired against him. He had even been reduced to KP, when such duty was allowable punishment. Once he quoted from a letter he had written his congressman. Once he broke down and put his head on the table and wept and announced that his wife was no better than an embarcadero whore. She had divorced him while he was in England, and was remarried, now, to a lieutenant. Yet what he had to say about the inner workings of a SAC base, and its security system, was clear enough and had the ring of truth in it. Horgan's ideas were ingenious, and his advice explicit, but Smith wondered how long he would be allowed to live. Not long, surely, after he had been pumped dry and began to repeat himself and got on the nerves of the O.O. agents who guarded him and the intelligence officers who fawned on him, and dressed him in the trappings of a colonel, while despising him.