“I don’t know. Obviously. But I’ve thought about it a lot,” Jerry said. “My best guess—and that’s all it is—is that it could sense the K-129 had nuclear weapons aboard, and it didn’t like that. The Glomar Explorer is just a ship. No proof, only a possibility.”

Dobrynin and Bronstein glanced at each other. Almost at the same time, they both shrugged. Major Bronstein tapped the photo of Humpty Dumpty with his index finger. “You say this is what you were concealing from Soviet reconnaissance?”

“Uh-huh. We knew when your spy satellites would be coming over. We made sure you couldn’t spot this. You’ll probably have pictures of the moon pool from before we brought up the spaceship, but not from afterward. This is why.”

“He’s right about that,” Dobrynin said to Bronstein in quick Russian.

“They would have covered it for a sub, too, or however much of it they brought up,” the assistant military attaché answered in the same language. Jerry was more sure he wasn’t supposed to understand than that he really had.

Dobrynin set a thick-fingered hand down on the photographs and on Jerry’s account. “We may keep these? I may possibly need to refer to them when I speak to people in authority in the United States.”

“Yes, you can do that.” A certain pang accompanied Jerry’s nod. Without the photos and what he’d written, would he really believe he’d ever seen and done these things? Pictures and writing made memory concrete.

“You mentioned Doctor Dole’s death. We knew of this, but did not connect it to anything involving the Hughes Glomar Explorer,” Major Bronstein said. “Do you think you are in danger yourself?”

“Probably,” Jerry said. “He got killed right after Jack Anderson talked about the Glomar Explorer. They took us both off the ship when we showed we weren’t happy about how they were trying to get specimens from Humpty Dumpty’s hull. As soon as I heard he was dead, I came east. I didn’t stick around waiting to be a target.”

“How did you cross the country safely?” Bronstein asked with what sounded like professional curiosity.

Jerry shrugged. “I got my hair cut and my beard shaved. I used cash. No phone calls—my wife will be going nuts. And I had a car they didn’t know I had.”

“Ah.” Bronstein eyed him. “You may be an amateur, but this is sound tradecraft. I think that is the English word, tradecraft.”