Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  “We did things during the war that,” the Commander-in-Chief blustered uncomfortably, not meeting the other man’s eye, “that we had to…”

  Everybody in the Oval Office was looking at the National Security Advisor. Some resentfully as if to say: “What right do you have to pretend that you are any better than us?”

  Kissinger was supposed to be the cleverest man in any room he walked into in DC; it was a bit late to try to claim that he had not known what was going on all along just because he himself had never, at any time, actually got his hands dirty.

  “Operation Maelstrom started while Ike was in this office, Henry,” John Ehrlichmann said. “JFK’s people green-lighted it, LBJ was so pissed off with Doctor King and his people for keeping up the pressure in the South, that he signed an Executive Order authorising Hoover to start tapping phones…”

  “But that was already going on, anyway?” This Kissinger retorted, his voice gravelly and pitched sotto voce in what, infuriatingly, sounded to those around him like incredulity.

  “Yeah, but LBJ had just got past the Kitty Hawk thing, and the Kennedy people were still trying to shut him out of a lot of stuff at the time…”

  Kissinger had latched onto the nuance that Johnson had not been in the Oval Office long enough to unravel the half of what had been, and was continuing to go on, out of sight and out of mind.

  “So, LBJ never knew the scope and scale of Operation Maelstrom. What about JFK?”

  “You’d have to go up to Hyannis Port and ask him, Henry?” Bob Haldeman suggested sarcastically, trying to listen to what Walter Brenckmann was saying on the TV.

  “I might just do that, Bob,” Kissinger replied levelly.

  The White House Chief of Staff frowned, tried to tune out the background noise. They did not have time to swap recriminations or play the blame game; right now, they needed to work out how they were going to distance the President from the unprecedented shit storm that was about to hit the Oval Office.

  “No, I have not spoken to President Nixon about this,” Walter Brenckmann admitted. “Honestly, I do not see what good that would do. I believe that the Administration has been spying on its friends and its adversaries – I have no idea whether I and my family fall into the former or the latter category – it does not matter. What matters is that the whole nation has been misled about the Warwick Hotel Scandal, and so many other things that frankly, it beggars my imagination as it must do, millions of my fellow Americans. Our friends and allies must be looking on, watching this, wondering if they can believe their ears and eyes. Personally, I feel like I have been duped, and deceived. The current Administration has been using powers granted to it in war time to mount a Soviet-style deep state surveillance and counter intelligence operation against its own people. I do not care if spokesmen for the GOP – thus far, I gather, the White House has adopted the approach of hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, the approach of the three brass monkeys – are right, or wrong when they claim both Democrat and Republican Administrations are equally culpable. When my own government spies on me and mine, I don’t care how much or little they are doing it; what I care about is that they are riding a coach and horses through the Constitution of the United States of America!”

  Walter Brenckmann’s denouncement was all the more damning for being enunciated in the quiet, sober voice of a man who patently felt he had been horribly let down.

  Betrayed, in fact.

  “Therefore, I cannot and I will not continue serve an Administration, or a President, whom I consider to be a crook.”

  Chapter 24

  Friday 3rd February 1967

  Odessa, Ukraine

  The car ground over the previous week’s partially cleared snowfall, now frozen solid by the bitter north easterly winds blowing straight off the Siberian tundra.

  “It has been a while since you and I talked, Comrade Sergey Georgyevich,” the Supreme Soviet, head of the Troika and Chairman and First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin decided, staring out of the frosted window of the ancient Red Army car bumping and grinding along in the middle of the heavily armed convoy heading for the city’s newly refurbished air base. “Perhaps, it may be that recent events, if nothing else, prove that this has been…counter-productive.”

  Admiral of the Fleet Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov, Minister of Defence and First Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party, and since July 1964 the number two man in the Soviet hierarchy, grunted noncommittally, unconsciously running a nicotine-stained forefinger through his now grey moustache.

  The two men sat alone in the back of the car, jolted painfully every time the wheels hit a bump or juddered on an ice ridge. The vehicle’s heater blew lukewarm air fouled by the exhausts of the armoured personnel carrier leading the small procession of cars carrying the rest of the United Nations delegation out of the snowbound city.

  The passenger section of the Supreme Soviet’s rattling conveyance was partitioned off from the driver’s cabin by a sound and bullet-proofed bulkhead.

  Privately, Sergey Gorshkov was seething.

  And not just on account of the first, inconclusive – albeit wildly optimistic – Red Air Force reports of the attack on the ships of the former French Mediterranean Fleet anchored at Villefranche-sur-Mer.

  Forgetting for the moment the fact that Gorshkov and his Red Navy Staff had had plans for those ships, what ought to have been a straightforward – granted very long-range - bombing operation against targets unaware that they were under attack until it was too late, had, whatever the Air Force said, resulted in at best, only a partial success. More worrying, from the tone of the first reports passed to him, Gorshkov suspected that the raid had been far from the unopposed ‘cake run’ he had been assured it would be, and that several of the priceless, irreplaceable Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers – three-quarters of all the serviceable aircraft of their type, which had participated in the Villefranche operation – had been damaged, or disastrously, lost. That at least three aircraft, possibly four of the Tu-95s had diverted to Clermont-Ferrand, presumably because of battle damage, or mechanical failures, might yet turn out to be the sourest of sour icing on a very, very bitter cake.

  And as for Warsaw Concerto…

  The political and the military aspects of geopolitical policy were indivisible. Diplomacy was war by other means; conversely, war was diplomacy by other means.

  Or was it?

  If Gorshkov had not already known that his power and influence was on the wane when a third, permanent member of the Troika, one of Shelepin’s protégés, had been anointed; the fact that the man whose name appeared on the initial draft plan for Warsaw Concerto, had not been summarily sacked, or he and his family deported to the Gulag, nor even consigned to house arrest or internal exile, but rather, he had been handed a cushy, high-profile job in the Russian Far East, would have hammered home the point.

  Mikhail Gorbachev would have been the guest of the Lubyanka in the old days, beaten to a pulp and forced to confess his treachery in front of a show trial. Not treated with kid gloves; not treated in such a way that meant that one day he was going to return to Sverdlovsk like a fucking prodigal son!

  Okay, he got it that the man had been removed, temporarily, from the Boss’s inner circle. It would be a while before Mikhail Sergeyevich would again enjoy unfettered access to the head of the Troika. But Gorbachev had actually, if one was being pedantic about it, been promoted at least two ranks in the Party!

  Shelepin had allegedly written the bloody man’s wife, Raisa, a personal letter, exhorting her to do everything in her power to ‘support Mikhail Sergeyevich’ in his ‘new and vital role’ in Vladivostok!

  Understandably, the old Admiral was reeling.

  What did it all mean?

  All the old certainties of the Soviet system seemed to be shifting under his feet like the deck of a destroyer in an Arctic storm. Nor was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev the only one who had failed to be punished fo
r the misrepresentation of Warsaw Concerto – or rather, the way certain Party apparatchiks and middle-ranking Red Army officers had chosen to interpret its goals – and the fallout, mixed messages, and miss-steps which had subsequently caused so much confusion with both the Chinese and with the Americans.

  Warsaw Concerto was supposed to be a fucking propaganda exercise to boost morale on the home front! Instead, some idiot, or cabal – probably in the fucking KGB, those bastards were still a rule unto themselves despite the Boss being one of them – had promulgated it across the fucking globe!

  Gorshkov himself, had not really understood what was going on until the Boss had ordered the attack on the French Fleet at Villefranche, and in effect, cut off their French allies at the knees.

  It was a mess.

  Normally, this sort of shit heap would be covered up by a purge. But all that had happened was that a handful of Party apparatchiks and military officers, none very close to the Boss, had been sacked or transferred to Red Army units stationed in the frozen north. It was almost as if the Boss had used the whole thing as an excuse to get rid of a gang of time servers, to coppice out dead wood and the unproductive, redundant ‘drag’ that their families and hangers-on had represented within the Sverdlovsk-Chelyabinsk military-industrial complex. Obviously, the KGB had identified a handful of counter-revolutionary scapegoats, and things had not gone well for their families but otherwise, even the sanctions against the ‘guilty’ had amounted to little more than cursory metaphorical slaps on the wrists.

  And as for Shelepin’s, pretty near damned ‘open letter’, to Comrade Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, the Troika’s ‘enforcer’, telling him, basically, that there would be no more ‘terror’…

  What the fuck was all that about?

  “When do I get to be purged, Comrade Chairman?” Gorshkov demanded gruffly.

  Alexander Shelepin did not look at him; he continued to gaze, contemplatively out of the misted window.

  “Purge you?” He echoed.

  “Yes! Isn’t that why we’re both going to San Francisco? You don’t trust me enough to leave me at home while you’re away?”

  Shelepin glanced to the other man.

  Looked away again.

  “In future, we must understand each other better, Sergey Georgyevich,” Shelepin sighed. “If you and I, and the factions who look to us for guidance, cannot coexist, then what hope is there for the Motherland, or for the International Revolution?”

  Gorshkov was a life-long believer in counter-attack being the best form of defence: “Why wasn’t I forewarned of the change of policy over France?”

  “Because you would have objected,” Shelepin returned, bloodlessly. “As indeed you did when I ordered you to bomb the French Fleet at Villefranche. Which would have been communicated far and wide. As it is, if things have not gone as well as we hoped, we can both, justly and with clean hands, blame Comrade Konstantin Andreevich.”

  Chief Marshal of Aviation, the Head of the Red Air Force, Konstantin Andreevich Vershinin, had been a key conspirator in the overthrow, and swift liquidation of the Brezhnev regime back in July 1964. His reward had been to remain in command of the Red Air Force, subordinate in the Defence Ministry only to Gorshkov, and in that role he had served, grumpily, with bad-tempered ill-grace at times, but loyally, ever since.

  Gorshkov changed the subject.

  “Whatever happens, we must keep up, increase if possible, the support for the Front Internationale…”

  Alexander Shelepin knew the other man was needling him, looking to revisit a decision which had already been made. He refused to rise to the bait.

  “Propping up the FI even at the risk of forcing the Americans to send troops to Western Europe again?” He countered, reasonably.

  “What makes you think they haven’t already made that decision?”

  Alexander Shelepin brushed this aside with a shrug.

  “As you know, I have always accepted that there is merit in actions which continue to,” he thought carefully, ‘stress the reactionary forces in power in the British Isles.”

  The two men lapsed into their thoughts for some seconds.

  The car’s engine rumbled and roared.

  “Our last best chance of militarily confronting the West in Europe died when Brezhnev and his cronies pissed away what was left of the Red Army in Iran and Iraq,” Alexander Shelepin said with a quiet, stinging bitterness. “Krasnaya Zarya ought to have been a dagger to the heart of our enemies overseas, not an enemy within.”

  Gorshkov opened his mouth to speak.

  “No, no,” Shelepin went on, shaking his head, “of course, I acknowledge that Red Dawn won great advances in the beginning. Nor do I discount that in France and to a lesser extent, elsewhere in the West, it remains a thorn in the side of our adversaries. But let us, you and I, not get carried away with the vodka talk of our staffers, and of those comrades who claim great deeds for their heroic Krasnaya Zarya brothers and sisters. We both know Red Dawn had little or no part in the American rebellion, or their so-called Civil War. We have no spies in America, and only a few in England. Krasnaya Zarya is a nightmare only to the Motherland; it kills Soviet soldiers and civilians every day of every week, because of Red Dawn we must fight a guerrilla war for control of our southern republics, the Anatolian littoral and the whole southern coast of the Black sea is a lawless wasteland denied to us. As many of us predicted in the days before the Cuban Missiles War, Krasnaya Zarya was always likely to become a repository of Islamic fundamentalism, and counter-revolutionary dissidents’ ambitions in the Southern Republics. Now, as a result of the war in the Middle East so foolishly embarked upon by our predecessors, we face civil wars on our borders all the way from Afghanistan to the Adriatic. In time, our enemies in the West will, no doubt, do whatever they can to fuel those religious and separatist movements spawned by the nihilism and ethnic genocide promoted by Krasnaya Zarya. You know as well as I do that day-to-day, we cannot even keep the Dardanelles open, that it is only a matter of time before we must withdraw our remaining forces from the Anatolian Littoral and the Balkans, that we must re-trench, focus upon reconstruction.”

  Gorshkov, at fifty-six the older man by eight years, could never remember hearing such unmitigated exasperation in the Boss’s voice. Or what, to his ears, sounded a little like…defeatism.

  Wisely, he elected to say nothing.

  “For all we know,” Shelepin went on, visibly breathing hard, trying to keep the lid on his anger. “We have Krasnaya Zarya agents to thank for inflating Warsaw Concerto into a global challenge to the Yankees and their English poodles!”

  The car slowed down to traverse a particularly pot-holed, crumbling stretch of road further ruined by that winter’s frost and ice.

  “If we cannot be honest with ourselves, you with I,” Alexander Shelepin put to his Defence Minister and de facto deputy, “who are we really deceiving, Comrade Sergey Georgyevich?

  In a moment he answered his own question.

  “Ourselves, I think. Certainly not our enemies. They must know that the surviving fragments of the USSR constitute less than forty percent of our pre-war mass, that three-fourths of our industry and agriculture was burned away by the firestorms. We think, we choose to believe that around thirty-five millions of our fellow citizens survive in those regions still under our control, possibly another few millions in the wastelands we no longer pretend to govern, existing in the margins within or beyond the bombed-out areas, or on the fringes of the former, now burned down forests. The reality of it is that many of the communities we call ‘new republics’ in Central Europe are in reality disparate Krasnaya Zarya colonies, loyal to Sverdlovsk only so long as we keep the railroads open and send them grain, and what little surplus of manufactured goods that we can afford from our re-located industries beyond the Urals and in the Far East. Thus far, we have lived in peace with the People’s Republic of China but if that peace ever broke down, short of using nuclear weapons, we would surely lose Manchuria and
the Amur industrial region; that would gut us, cripple us and probably condemn the Motherland to the status of an impoverished central Asian pauper for untold generations.”

  Gorshkov said nothing to this because he was struck dumb, literally lost for words. Never in his life had he heard a senior colleague, or anybody with any standing in the Party deliver such an excoriatingly bleak – and honest – critique of the Motherland’s abject political, military and economic bankruptcy.

  “We need to be worrying about feeding our people this winter,” Shelepin ground on, his tone lowly malevolent. “Not wasting our time wringing our hands over how to promote the global march of Marxist-Leninism!”

  The convoy drove onto the smooth concrete apron of the airfield. In the distance snow ploughs were churning up and down the main runway and attempting to keep the taxiways clear of drifting snow.

  The car halted.

  The door on Shelepin’s side was opened.

  “Shut the fucking door!”

  The trooper standing in the snow was so terrified he inadvertently slammed it, coming within a millimetre of trapping the Chairman’s left hand.

  Shelepin took a series of long, deep breaths.

  Then, turning to face Gorshkov, he spoke in a near whisper.

  “We must look to the world as it is, not how we would wish it to be. The war may not have bombed us all the way back to the Stone Age, as some Americans no doubt still desire; but everything the Revolution achieved is in ruins. We must acknowledge that to become again a rival to the American Empire is the work of, perhaps, two generations.”

  His pale face was pinched with weariness.

  “We have lost so much, Sergey Georgyevich. Frankly, there are few enough of us left to carry on the struggle. We must find a way out of the cycle of war. I don’t know if that is even possible, or realistic,” he groaned, “but we must at least try to make peace with our enemies.”