Red Army Spies and the Blackrobes Trilogy

by Patrick Trese

  That morning, however, Charley was able to picture himself in the crowd assembled for the Last Judgement. He saw himself as just one solitary, insignificant human soul among the billions of human souls who ever existed in the past and would ever exist in the future. Just one more human who had dared to challenge the Creator, like a gnat trying to defy an elephant.

  So far, so good, Charley thought. He had been able to see how ridiculous he was. But then he ran into trouble at the Fourth Point when he tried to see his bodily corruption and foulness.

  “There is nothing more repulsive than the human body in decay,” Father Samozvanyetz had told them. “We turn away in horror from the rotting flesh. We cannot bear the sight or stand the stench. But consider the foulness and corruption of a soul after a lifetime of venial sin. ‘Look upon yourself,’ Saint Ignatius tells us, ‘as a sore or an ulcer from which have sprung so many sins and so many iniquities and so much vile poison’.

  “Then try to imagine God against Whom you have sinned. Compare your ignorance to His knowledge. Compare your weakness to His omnipotence. Compare your petty malice with His infinite goodness. Try to imagine God Who has lavished Mankind with oceans of love. Then try to plumb the depths of your ingratitude and indifference.”

  Charley tried, he really did. But he was finding it hard to stay awake. He kept drifting away. So he stood up to clear his brain. He moved to the Fifth Point and tried to feel the amazement it called for, but the best he could achieve was to acknowledge that the other creatures of the world had not risen up against him, that the Angels had not come after him with flaming swords of Divine Justice, that the earth had not cracked open to swallow him.

  That was too much for Charley. He knew he really wasn’t all that bad. He was not an evil person. Thoughtless and uncaring, maybe. Careless and unmindful of God’s will in his everyday living. But he was, when you came right down to it, just a law-abiding member of the Catholic Church. And, as Father Samozvanyetz had told him privately, a layman’s personal standards could not be as strict as those of a member of a religious order. Not without getting his brain screwed up.

  So he gave up and knelt down to make the Colloquy. He could probably handle that.

  First, he tried to think about God’s mercy. Then, with eyes pressed tightly shut, he tried to make his prayer heard in Heaven.

  Dear Lord, he prayed silently, thank You for letting me live until now. I’m sorry for all my sins and, with the help of Your grace, I will try to amend my life in the future. Honest. Amen.

  He realized he didn’t sound all that sincere, so he said the Our Father and tried to mean it. Before he was halfway through, the electric bell rang.

  Charley stopped and congratulated himself. His meditation hadn’t been very good, but at least he finished on time.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  In Washington, President Kennedy continued his public show of normal activity. Following his private intelligence briefing and his routine office chores, he spent ninety minutes with the visiting Foreign Minister of West Germany talking about Berlin and not talking about Cuba. Photographers were given the opportunity to take pictures when the meeting in the Oval Office ended.

  Just before noon, the White House press corps followed the President to Saint Matthew’s Cathedral to cover his scheduled participation in the National Day of Prayer. Later that afternoon, the reporters and photographers accompanied the President to Connecticut where he spent the rest of the day campaigning for Governor John Dempsey who was running for re-election and former Governor Abraham Ribbicoff who was running for the Senate. During stops at Bridgeport, Waterbury and New Haven, the President kept the press corps and the public focused on domestic issues, not international affairs.

  For one more day, he had avoided any public discussion of Cuba and of what might (or might not) be happening there.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  By Wednesday evening, Charley was convinced that his decision not to try to become a Jesuit had been correct. It was too darn tough.

  Not the physical part. He didn’t mind that too much. Rising at five in the morning every day wasn’t easy, but he was getting used to it. And the meals were just fine. It was the spiritual stuff that was too tough.

  It wasn’t that he had any desire to commit a lot of sins and live a life of crime. Far from it. But he knew he couldn’t spend a lifetime trying to avoid every fault and imperfection like the others were going to have to do. If he had to do that, he’d go nuts.

  Besides that, the ideas being presented to the novices were just too heavy, for Charley at least. He had imagined that meditation would be a peaceful activity, something like listening to good music. You’d just stay quiet and think nice thoughts.

  But Father Samozvanyetz had the novices wrestling with some really grim ideas. Like: “Sin, one might say, is such a repugnant sight in the eyes of God that, in the end, He must banish it from His sight.”

  Well, that was most likely true and Charley could accept what Father Samozvanyetz had said, but he couldn’t look at it very long. He could think about it for a few minutes but then he’d have to turn the dial and try to find a station broadcasting something less disturbing.

  There was, Father Samozvanyetz had told the novices early on, a technique they should all strive to master, “a manner of grasping a truth so that it will have an effect on your life.”

  Charley wasn’t doing so well with that. During that first week of the Exercises, he’d been able to consider the true nature of his sins and he thought he’d developed a feeling of abhorrence for them. He couldn’t possibly see the nature of Sin the way God could, but he thought he understood what Father Samozvanyetz had been driving at. Even so, he couldn’t get much beyond that.

  The whole point of the contemplations of the nature of Sin was not just to get you to get your life in order. It was more than that. Loyola wrote “that I may know the world in order that, hating it, I may put away from me worldly and vain things.”

  The novices were supposed to pray for the grace to accomplish that. But Charley had skipped that prayer. He couldn’t go anywhere near it. Charley didn’t hate the world. He had no burning desire to put away what Saint Ignatius would probably consider to be “worldly or vain things”. Now that he knew he was going to be a layman and not a Jesuit, he was going to go his own way.

  After leaving Milford, he was going to try for an athletic scholarship and play football in college. That was worldly, for sure, but why wouldn’t it be okay? He would do his best to avoid mortal sin and as much venial sin as he could. That was something he was getting out of the Long Retreat. And that wasn’t bad.

  But now it was Wednesday night. He was still playing his part. And Father Samozvanyetz was beginning to explain the Points for the Thursday morning meditation.

  “We have come to the Fifth Exercise, my dear brothers in Christ. It is a meditation on Hell.”

  Standing at the center of the altar, the priest touched his folded hands to his lips. He seemed to be searching for the right words.

  “Many people believe or hope that Hell must be a spiritual state, not an actual, physical place. But Ignatius Loyola urges us to think about Hell in concrete, physical terms. And the Scriptures, the words of Christ, the teachings of apostles, the writers and artists and poets, all give our finite minds something to work with here.

  “Someday this Meditation on Hell may save your soul when nothing else can. Someday, if your understanding of God grows dim, if your sense of duty to God becomes dull, if your love of God turns dry and cold, then perhaps your fear of the pain the damned suffer may keep you from committing a mortal sin.

  “So, pray, my dear brothers in Christ, for this interior sense of pain the Saint talks about. Pray, because the salvation of your immortal soul may someday depend upon your fear of Hell.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  That night, while Charley Coogan was taking his notes on Hell and saying his nighttime prayers, the photo-interpreters in Washington were scanning photographs from the
U-2 missions. There was no small talk, no jokes. The large room where they worked at their light boxes was almost silent.

  West of Havana, in the Guanajay area, they had found another missile site under construction, larger and more sophisticated than the ones already discovered.

  At this new site, they could see concrete being poured for four launch pads. Ditches were being dug for cables that would connect the launch pads to two control bunkers. Not far away, workers were erecting something that looked like a concrete Quonset hut.

  Was this a prefabricated nuclear warhead storage bunker? They compared the U-2 photo of the base under construction in Cuba to a high-altitude photograph of an SS-5 launching site in the Soviet Union. The layouts were identical. Their suspicions were confirmed. By Thursday morning, they had identified two more Soviet SS-5 missile sites under construction, but they had not seen any SS-5 missiles.

  According to the intelligence data, the SS-5 was 82 feet long and eight feet thick. It was a single-stage intermediate-range ballistic missile with a range of 2,000 miles. It could carry a five-megaton nuclear warhead.

  From Cuba, an SS-5 could hit almost any of the strategic targets on the North American continent. Only the Pacific Northwest was beyond its reach. “That’s scary as Hell, isn’t it?” someone remarked.

  The room fell silent again and the photo-interpreters kept looking.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The man who played Father Samozvanyetz could not shake off his feelings of dread. He had been carrying on, playing his part, waiting for some call to action, but he had heard nothing from Oksana Volkova, much less from President Kennedy.

  There were rumors about Cuba in the newspapers, but nothing of substance. Some Republicans were claiming that Russian missile bases might be being built in Cuba, but their speculation seemed based on nothing more solid than political ambition.

  Had President Kennedy learned about Khrushchev’s missiles by now, he wondered? If he had, he was certainly not letting on. Perhaps it was all over. Perhaps Khrushchev had come to his senses and had called the whole thing off. Most likely, he had not.

  The man who played Father Samozvanyetz could only sit and wait. The rockets would start flying soon enough and there seemed to be nothing he could do to stop them. The world could end before he finished thinking about it.

  Years ago, huddled in a hole in the ground, he had waited for an artillery barrage to begin. He had heard the thunder of the distant German guns and taken cover, knowing that he could do nothing except close his eyes tight and wait for the shells to arrive. It had been only a matter of seconds, but it had seemed like an eternity that he had waited to learn his fate. Finally the shells landed and exploded all around him. All his questions about life and death were answered before he had time to put them into words.

  Would there be any warning of Earth’s final bombardment? Would there be any time for apprehension, however brief, before the world destroyed itself? Did the people in Hiroshima have any time to realize what was about to happen to them before it actually happened?

  No, of course not. How could they? Such a thing had never happened before. Perhaps people in Nagasaki might have had some inkling. They must have known what had happened at Hiroshima a few days before. But it was possible that chaos, confusion and censorship had kept the people of Nagasaki in the dark until the blinding light annihilated them.

  It was odd that the dread of total world destruction was greater than any fear of his own death. And it had been with him now, day and night, for more than a week. All that he knew of this world—Moscow, Milford, Anya, even Oksana Volkova—all could be gone, suddenly and forever.

  It was only when he was in the little chapel, instructing his novices, that he was free of the terror. As soon as he left their company, the dark thoughts returned.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  That Thursday morning, Charley Coogan felt totally caught up in a spiritual exercise. It had started slowly without any conscious effort on his part. One minute, he was kneeling at his desk with his eyes closed. Then, everything changed.

  The darkness lightened as he descended through a bright, expanding tunnel until he was soaring through a limitless brilliance high above a dark, unfamiliar landscape. He could see below him the vast ocean of fire, the great billows of flame crashing against the barren, scorched rocks of the shore. Within the flames, he could see writhing, suffering human souls. There were millions of them, all reaching out to him in their agony. He could hear the howling and the wailing, the screams and the curses, the blasphemies against Christ and all the saints in Heaven, the rising and falling cries of hatred and despair.

  He could feel the heat of the flames and the pain of the souls who were burning for all eternity in this blazing sea of unrepented mortal sin. The stench gagged him: all the acrid, oily smoke, the putrid corruption, the rotted hopes and dreams.

  Afterwards, he was not able to account for the time he had spent in meditation. How long had he hovered above that awful place? He could not tell. But somehow, he realized, he had been able to use his five senses, not just his intellect and will, in performing a spiritual exercise. It was as if he had accidentally learned to fly.

  When the bell rang, he thanked God for His great kindness and mercy in allowing him to understand the dangers he had, so far, escaped. And in this he was sincere. But the joy of his unexpected epiphany soon evaporated and he was overcome by a deep foreboding that did not leave him for the rest of the day.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  At eleven o’clock that Thursday morning, the Executive Committee on National Security was in the Seventh Floor conference room of the State Department learning what had been discovered in Cuba.

  The U-2 photos showed that Russians and Cubans were working around the clock. The SS-5 intermediate missile bases could be operational in less than two months. According to the briefing officers, the SS-5 missiles were “first-strike nuclear weapons.”

  A first salvo from Cuba could drop forty nuclear warheads into the United States as far west as Montana. Eighty million Americans would be killed in a matter of minutes.

  The members of the Executive Committee had not yet reached consensus. Still on the table were diplomatic negotiations with the USSR, requesting action by the UN Security Council, setting up a naval blockade of Cuba, an aerial attack on the missile bases and a military invasion.

  Time was running out. The first of the SS-5 bases would be ready to launch its missiles in just eighteen hours.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  During this first week of the Spiritual Exercises, with its intense concentration on Sin and Hell and Damnation, the man who played Father Samozvanyetz became more and more fearful that he had made a grave error when he accepted the challenge of leading the Long Retreat. He had over-estimated his own ability.

  He was struggling just to stay one conference ahead of the novices he was supposed to be instructing. It was hard going, this preparation. For research material, he had only Ignatius Loyola’s brusque spiritual treatise, John Beck’s naïve notes and the memories he had extracted from Alex Samozvanyetz. There was no one he could ask for guidance, not without giving himself away.

  Beck’s lecture notes were well organized, but the tone of his commentary, which ranged from banal to overly reverent, was a far cry from Alex Samozvanyetz’s plainspoken sincerity.

  As for Loyola, the saint’s rhetoric struck him as hopelessly antique. His dogmatic directives were, at times, incredibly bizarre. But the survival of his mission—to ascertain the intentions of the President of the United States and, if possible, influence his decisions—now depended on his ability to make Loyola’s odd ideas compelling to his audience of bright young Twentieth Century Americans. To hold that audience, he was now convinced, he would have to upstage Father John Beck and Saint Ignatius Loyola.

  He would have to step forward with what he could best bring to life: his own experiences and the recollections and beliefs of the dead Jesuit he had to pretend to be. Thank God, he reminded
himself, an actor only has to believe the words while he is saying them.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  President Kennedy’s first scheduled meeting Thursday, at one o’clock, was with the visiting Japanese Minister of International Trade and Industry. But he had spent most of the morning preparing for his second meeting that afternoon with Andrei Gromyko, the Foreign Secretary of the Soviet Union.

  For all any of the President’s advisers knew, it could be anything from a routine diplomatic visit to the delivery of an ultimatum. The President ordered that the U-2 photo displays of the missiles in Cuba be ready to be shown to Gromyko, just in case.

  The meeting lasted more than two hours. The American president gave no indication that he knew anything about the missiles in Cuba. The Russian foreign minister did not give even a hint of their existence.

  When the meeting ended and Gromyko left the White House, President Kennedy spoke privately with his brother about his Friday schedule. He would keep his political commitments, first in Ohio and then in Illinois.

  “But I want to play a hunch, Bobby. Before I leave Cleveland, I want to talk with that Jesuit we got out of Russia. Nobody’s to know. Set it up for me, will you?”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “My dear brothers in Christ,” the man who played Father Samozvanyetz said to the novices assembled in the small chapel, “the interior fear of Hell, which Saint Ignatius urges us to develop, must have a rational basis in order to be an effective safeguard. So let us apply our intellect to this.”

  He sat down behind his table and shoved Ignatius’s little book to one side. He folded his hands and spoke softly.

  “As you know, I was for many years an exile and a prisoner in a hostile land. I lived in harsh conditions. Many times, I feared for my life. Sometimes I feared for my very soul.

  “But the most painful thing to endure was the realization that I might die in captivity, that I would never come home. What I learned was that a person can live for years upon years through the darkest exile if he could maintain even the faintest glimmer of hope. I saw many other prisoners die in loneliness and despair. But I managed to survive, I believe now, because I could see a higher purpose for my existence, even in exile.