The tight uneasiness went out of Emmett's expression, and he noticeably relaxed. He opened his attaché case and handed the President a leather-bound folder.
"Here is a detailed report from the Walter Reed pathology lab. Their examination was most helpful in giving us a lead for identification."
The President looked at him in surprise. "You identified them?"
"It was the analysis of the borscht paste that opened the door."
"Borscht what?"
"You recall that the Dade County coroner fixed death by hypothermia, or freezing?"
"Yes."
Yes."
"Well, borscht paste is a god-awful food supplement given to Russian cosmonauts. The stomachs of the three corpses were loaded with the stuff."
"You're telling me that Raymond LeBaron and his crew were exchanged for three dead Soviet cosmonauts?"
Emmett nodded. "We were even able to put a name on them through a defector, a former flight surgeon with the Russian space program. He'd examined each of them on several occasions."
"When did he defect?"
"He came over to our side in August of '87."
"A little over two years ago."
"That's correct," Emmett acknowledged. "The names of the cosmonauts found in LeBaron's blimp are Sergei Zochenko, Alexander Yudenich, and Ivan Ronsky. Yudenich was a rookie, but Zochenko and Ronsky were both veterans with two space flights apiece."
"I'd give my next year's salary to know how they came to be inside that damned blimp."
"Regrettably, we turned up nothing concerning that part of the mystery. At the moment, the only Russians circling the earth are four cosmonauts on board the Salyut 9 space station. But the NASA people, who are monitoring the flight, say they're all in good health."
The President nodded. "So that eliminates any Soviet cosmonaut on a space flight and leaves only those on the ground."
"That's the odd twist," Emmett continued. "According to the forensic pathology people at Walter Reed, the three men they examined probably froze to death while in space."
The President's eyebrows raised. "Can they prove it?"
"No, but they say several factors point in that direction, starting with the borscht paste and the analysis of other condensed foods the Soviets are known to consume during space travel. Also evident were physiological signs the men had breathed air of a high oxygen constant and spent considerable time in a weightless environment."
"Wouldn't be the first time the Soviets have launched men into space and failed to retrieve them. They could have been up there for years, and fell to earth only a few weeks ago after their orbit decayed."
"I'm only aware of two instances where the Soviets suffered fatalities," said Emmett. "The cosmonaut whose craft became tangled in the shrouds of its reentry parachute and slammed into Siberia at five hundred miles an hour. And the three Soyuz crewmen who died after a faulty hatch leaked away their oxygen."
"The disasters they couldn't cover up," said the President. "The CIA has recorded at least thirty cosmonaut deaths since the beginning of their space missions. Nine of them are still up there, drifting around in space. We can't advertise the fact on our end because it would jeopardize our intelligence sources."
"We-know-but-they-don't-know-we-know kind of affair."
"Precisely."
"Which brings us back to the three cosmonauts we've got lying here in Washington," said Emmett, clutching his briefcase on his lap.
"And a hundred questions, beginning with, Where did they come from?"
"I did some checking with the Aerospace Defense Command Center. Their technicians say the only spacecraft the Russians have sent aloft large enough to support a manned crew-- besides their orbiting station shuttles-- were the Selenos lunar probes."
At the word "lunar" something clicked in the President's mind. "What about the Selenos probes?"