A Cold Flight To Nowhereville

by Steve Fletcher

  “And you are a scientist for the Rodina, so we need you to think clearly. Have you never been drunk, then?”

  “I have, but infrequently.”

  “Tell me about a time that you were drunk?” Pavel Sergeivich grinned at the young scientist. “I should like to hear about it.”

  Aleksei recounted an incident of no particular import. He had been drunk and unable to find his way home, and a stranger had guided him. You glance at the ceiling, comrade, a characteristic in men who are lying. You are making this story up, aren’t you? Are you really a vodka virgin? A young Russian who doesn’t get drunk must be studious indeed…or have a reason for staying sober. Well, a man who will lie about such an unimportant matter will lie about more serious ones. He resolved to return to this line of questioning again, turn it around a bit and take perhaps two or three more runs at it. He was curious about Aleksei’s apparent lack of vices. Except smoking, he did do that.

  He spent several hours talking with Aleksei about trivial matters, drawing the scientist out, making him at ease. Since Pavel Sergeivich’s arrival at Baikonur he had studied any astrophysics texts he could find, and could converse on topics with which his subjects were familiar at an impressive level. This served very well to place them at ease, and Aleksei talked volubly about his work. Every piece of information was important to Pavel Sergeivich, no matter how inconsequential to the issue of the apparatchik’s death. He carefully absorbed every word, watching Aleksei’s position and movements, where his eyes were, what his hands were doing. Falsehoods and misdirection could be detected this way and when he did, he pursued it with a different line of questioning. Often the routes he took were circuitous, intending one subject to lead tangentially back to another. His conversation with Aleksei was methodical and comprehensive. After several hours he had satisfied himself that his initial conclusions were correct. Aleksei knew nothing.

  The sessions lasted far past midnight. He interrogated Yaroslav Ivanovitch from the Propulsion department at length, a shorter session with the Praporshchik who had been sent to recover the body, then Yaroslav’s supervisor and several of the dead man’s co-workers. By three AM he was finished.

  He switched off the hot gooseneck lamp, rose and stretched. He was tired and wanted a shower and a drink, then bed. The door to the interrogation room was standing open, and Piotr Vasilevich Kalyugin appeared. “So, comrade Director,” Pavel Sergeivich yawned, “you’re still awake?”

  “If you’re up, I’m up,” the older man replied, sitting heavily and plunking a bottle of vodka on the metal desk. He produced two paper cups and doled out copious amounts of liquor. “A long day, comrade. Learn anything interesting?”

  Pavel Sergeivich took a drink of the harsh liquor and pulled the first file from his stack. “Timofeev is clear. Supervisor Evgeniy knows nothing.” He tossed several other files aside. “Idiot. Idiot. Drunken idiot. In the old days we’d have the lot off to the gulag just for grins.”

  “Yes, the old days,” Kalyugin grumbled, drinking his vodka.

  “Then we have comrade Aleksei Denisovich.” Pavel Sergeivich fingered the thick file. “Family’s from Aktyubinsk. Attended Tomsk Polytechnik, degree in applied mathematics under Suvorov. Know him?”

  “Mm, met him once. Seemed like an egg-head.”

  “Well, comrade Aleksei has quite an opinion of him, which I suppose is good. Doesn’t have many vices—which is a little unusual but I can find no real problem with it, thinks pretty highly of himself…”

  “This is fascinating, comrade” Kalyugin muttered drily.

  The chekist grinned. “He’s basically harmless. Told me a few lies to make himself look not so much like a rube, which actually makes him more of one given that he’s talking to the KGB.”

  “Hmm. So what about the last one?”

  “This character,” he mused, pulling over the final folder. “Yaroslav Ivanovitch Loginov.”

  “You seem thoughtful, Pasha. He trouble you?”

  “No…not exactly.”

  “What, then?”

  Pavel Sergeivich searched for words. “Difficult to say, Piotr Vasilevich. I questioned him the longest.”

  “Does he know more than he tells?” the Director prompted.

  “I should like very much to say he does not…but it’s odd, Piotr Vasilevich, his answers were as they should have been, nothing that strange, but I am still left with the curious sensation that I have been very skillfully resisted. I have interrogated many men, mostly stupid, a few smart ones, a few murderers. He reminds me a bit of one of the smart ones…and yet he doesn’t.”

  A feeling of cold unrelated to the chill weather seemed to settle over the room. “You think he is resisting your interrogations?”

  Ushakov shifted himself around in his chair uneasily and poured himself more vodka. “No…no, not exactly. Just a bit of a feeling I had, once or twice during our conversations. Now I’m trying to sort it out. I haven’t run into resistance of the sort I describe to you very often, once with a German colonel during the war and another time with an American during that business in Korea. Both of them had experience with the forms of coercion I employ and so were on to the game. But when someone is as skilled as that, it is difficult for the chekist to know he is being resisted. I will give you an example: Loginov looked straight into my eyes the entire time.”

  “What’s unusual about that?”

  Ushakov raised a cautioning finger. “A lying man will not do that—in ninety-nine percent of the cases. He’ll look elsewhere, up at the ceiling most often.”

  “Really?” Kalyugin asked dubiously.

  “Quite true. This fact was well known during the War. But the remaining one percent, the ones that look into your eyes while they lie—they are the dangerous ones. They know what we look for, so they school themselves not to look away while they lie. In extremely rare cases, and then only if the mark is very good, he is trying to play you the same way, and using the same tools, that you are trying to play him.” He fell silent for a moment. “Loginov…does not feel right to me. But I think to fool me he would have to be quite good indeed.”

  Kalyugin shook his head. “Difficult to accept, Pasha, most difficult to accept. I find it hard to believe one of these raz’yebuy could be so skilled. The way you speak, it would make him either a hardened criminal, or it would almost presuppose training by the Americans or the British, and that would be extremely difficult to conceive. How would the Imperialists plant such a man among us?”

  “Mm,” the chekist nodded, “I suppose if one of these intelligentsia were a near-genius and master chess-player, he might be able to resist in such a manner without training. If he had complete control over his emotions.”

  “And some of these characters are geniuses,” Kalyugin cautioned him. “What’s this fellow’s background?”

  “Comes from Kursk. His family was originally from Georgia and there seems to have been some noble blood somewhere in their line, but that was quite a long time ago. Family moved to Kursk during the revolution when his father was a Bolshevik. Comrade Yaroslav fought the Germans with the 43rd, most of his family was killed. After the war he married Ulyana Gromov, from a good family, no children. Attended Moscow University, degrees in physics and chemistry. Aleksei says he suffers from mood swings.”

  “Yes, I know the type. They’re laughing one minute and trying to kill themselves the next. They’re damned disturbing. There are a few of those around here.”

  “He has a real problem with his wife, thinks she’s screwing a Kursk party official. Seems to have been interrogated before in the Lubyanka on an unimportant matter in the early 50’s but was released. Understands English. ”

  “Half of these clods understand English,” Kalyugin exclaimed impatiently. “That would be something to rouse suspicions with a kolkhoznik, comrade, but it means nothing here. One quarter of the physics textbooks in this place are written in English and the rest are in German, and the fact that those by and large escape censorship shoul
d be telling you something. And half of Moscow saw the inside of the Lubyanka during the early 50’s! Is there any connection between him and Nikolai?”

  “He knew him. But everyone knows everyone else on this project.”

  “Then what were he and Aleksei doing out walking so early? That might tell us something useful.”

  But Pavel Sergeivich shook his head. “No, they were just walking. They do so fairly frequently, so do some of the others I’ve noticed. We don’t have the kind of security here that allows us to restrict their movements.”

  “Nor are we likely to, comrade. We can’t send men hand over fist to the gulag as we once did.” He waved his hands in agitation. “We can’t use Article 58 with as broad a stroke as we once did, confiscating property and shipping whole city blocks off to the gulag. That’s what the damned article is supposed to be for. And that’s in the rest of the Soviet Union! Here it’s even worse because of this program. I cannot act without evidence of some kind, and so far this clown sounds no different than anyone else.”

  “I realize that, and I find myself unable to explain my feelings on the matter. I think he is either telling the truth or lying in a very skillful manner. A few years ago I might have recommended a more detailed series of interrogations on him.”

  Kalyugin sighed. “I know, Pasha, I know. But these are difficult times. Comrade Beria is not around anymore—I shouldn’t even be talking about him. Right now the rocket program is getting a lot of attention from Moscow. The scientists are given considerable freedom. As soon as they build some more housing in the village, some will be permitted to bring their families here, did you know that? What a nightmare that will be. I am so far seeing no reasonable excuse to hold this man. The drugs for the type of interrogation to which you refer are rare and very expensive, and none of them are located here. And in such a procedure there is risk of irreversible damage. This is not just an idiot kolkhoznik, comrade. The men who can do such work as these do don’t grow on trees. The Comrade Chief Designer will not permit us to harass one of his scientists without cause, and unless you can give me something better than this I shall have to report comrade Nikolai’s death as accidental. Even the physician did not find anything suspicious about the body and his conclusion is that he drank too much, fell asleep and choked to death on his own tongue.”

  Kalyugin stood up and yawned. “Let the Comrade Chief Designer take the heat from Moscow on the lack of progress. I’m not going to have the Central Committee using me as a whipping boy. Come, Pavel Sergeivich, it’s time to turn in. We shall watch and wait, eh?”

  Pavel Sergeivich nodded, but he was not happy. The examining physician was a drunken idiot who would seize on any excuse to pass the man’s death off as accidental and save himself a lot of trouble. And Kalyugin seemed a little too intent to write the matter off as an accident as well. He sighed inwardly. Such was the way in the Soviet Union. If a man saw a way by which he might ease his life a bit, he would take it. Reports were fudged, work was completed poorly, and that was the way things were. He would have to go along with the Director. The chances that Yaroslav Ivanovitch belonged in one percent who were able to beat an interrogation were minute. But he suspected the scientist to be dirty, and the maddening feeling that he had been very skillfully resisted would not go away.

  Tyuratam, Kazakhstan

  Her name was Katerina Bekturov, but most people called her Katia. On some evenings when the sun was setting and the shadows drew long over Tyuratam village, and the old men gathered on the porch of the Ilia’s tiny shop to play their dombras, they would try to get her to dance for them. And sometimes she would, for she was thirty-two and attractive, but she did not dance too often these days. This last year there were more soldiers and workers coming into the town and some tried to coax her into having sex with them. She was a young widow and once she had been raped, but fortunately that had only happened once. She had heard of similar happenings in the gulags, where upon arrival a woman could be raped repeatedly until a decision was made as to which guard should ‘have’ her. She was glad she was not in such a place.

  Until the last year, Tyuratam had been all but a ghost town. Its origins had been lost to history and were sometimes the subject of disputes, for the Russians claimed they founded it and the locals claimed they did not. Most likely the area had served as a stopover on the Silk Road, the ancient trade route that stretched across vast distances from China to Istanbul. Since then the village had been a sometime home to nomadic Kazakhs who grazed their rangy herds of cattle on the desert vegetation that grew nearby. As years passed the nomads replaced their traditional yurts with huts constructed of brick, mud and peat, and Tyuratam was born. But then copper had been discovered in the region, and for a brief time Tyuratam became a mining community. The railroad came through around the turn of the century and from the main track a spur had been laid 20 kilometers or so north to the mine pit. A pump was built and water was piped in from the nearby Syr Darya River, and from that time there always seemed to be crews of Russian mechanics living in the town. They would rotate in, work on the railroad or the mine for months at a time then rotate out again and a fresh crew would arrive. The sleepy little town had grown. The railroad made supplies and building materials more plentiful, and there had been perhaps thirty buildings by 1955 with a population of a few dozen.

  But things changed that year, for someone had decided that the old copper mine should be the site for a new research facility. They called it Scientific Research Test Range #5. In the beginning, special generator trains parked several kilometers up the spur had provided power for the construction teams, but now huge power lines were in place. More buildings had been erected in town, more housing for the crews working on the construction of the facility to the north. For the village of Tyuratam, this meant an unheard-of prosperity. Ilia’s shop was bigger now and offered a wider selection of merchandise. Now there was some bread and even some fuel to burn instead of the omnipresent kisiak, a rank bundle of straw and manure. There was a vehicle mechanic in town as well, and he worked on the old Studebaker and ZiS trucks that came and went along the new concrete road stretching north to the site of the old mine. Ilia had even been given an antique ZiS truck so that he could make deliveries to the facility, and this was an indication that a substantial number of rubles had been allocated to the project. Much had been made over Ilia and his vehicle, for it was a luxury beyond belief. And there were soldiers too. Most left her alone or flirted harmlessly with her, but a few she knew to watch out for. And so instead of a young woman’s clothing she wore the shabby skirts of a babushka to conceal her appearance.

  Katia was not originally from Tyuratam. She was from Ukraine, a small town called Kozova. She had married her husband there in 1954. But he contracted plague from a rat shortly after they had moved out to Kazakhstan and settled in Tyuratam in 1955, and now she was a widow. Their plan had been to herd cattle, but now that didn’t seem possible. Ilia took her on to work in his shop and so she got by. She augmented her income from time to time by sewing, for she was an excellent seamstress and sometimes the soldiers would pay her a few rubles to sew their clothing. She mourned her husband’s death but not for long. It wasn’t her way to dwell in the past.

  From the gray dust that was the front yard of the tiny hut in which she lived, she could see the lights of vehicles gleaming in the dusk around the railroad. It was a kilometer or so away and the trains came and went constantly, lulling her to sleep at night and waking her in the morning. Evening was drawing on and a chill wind was coming up, sweeping dust with it that peppered her skin. She gathered her long dark hair into a bun and covered her head with her shawl, pulling it more tightly around her. Being from Ukraine, Katia did not look like a typical Kazakh woman of the steppes, for she was prettier and more slender; she was not stocky in build and her hips possessed a comely curve. These traits she tended to minimize under shapeless clothing, however, and she spent enough time outdoors to ensure her skin had a deep tan resembling t
hat of the other villagers. But her dark eyes did not have the usual dullness of the kolkhozniks or old herdsmen.

  She enjoyed life here. If one could ignore the soldiers and the occasional trouble they brought her way, Tyuratam was quite a peaceful village. She had grown to love the steppe, especially in springtime when the desert exploded briefly into life and the Shrenkii tulips bloomed. It was beautiful then, but the desert was beautiful even when burnt and dry, or snowy and freezing. And such an out of the way village avoided most of the bureaucratic machinery that was the Soviet Union, and that was good. It would not always be so, for as Scientific Research Test Range #5 grew so would Tyuratam. But for now, right now, it was good.

  A train had stopped at the junction of the spur, and the sound of its diesel engines idling provided a low rumble that carried far over the quiet steppe. Men moved around, shouting and unloading crates. She watched them from her yard, listened to their clamor as they worked. Presently the locomotive continued on, the sound fading in the distance. More supplies for the research facility, perhaps some for the town. The crates bound for the research facility would be loaded onto flatcars sitting on the spur and a second locomotive would ferry them north. She lit a hand-rolled Kazakh cigarette before entering her hut to go to bed, standing for a while longer to smoke and enjoy the evening.

  She went to work at the shop the next morning, sweeping the floor, arranging the tins of food, and dusting the hardware implements while Ilia ran the antique cash register. Nobody was sure how old Ilia was, for he had the type of creased, weather-beaten face that made age a little ambiguous. She thought he was either sixty-two or ninety. He had a few children, two daughters, but they had long since followed the commerce and excitement of the western cities and he had not seen them in years. His wife had passed away a year ago, leaving him alone, but Ilia didn’t seem to mind much. Katia knew he missed her but all he would say was “these things happen,” in his stoic way and return to his work. He played his dombra in the evening with the others as he always had, or he played poker, and life went on. She liked him a great deal, and tried to make sure his shop always looked the best it could.