A Cold Flight To Nowhereville

by Steve Fletcher

  He neared the lights of the main gate, bright on the falling snow and shining on both approaches to the wooden barrier. He saw the normal compliment of troops standing in and around the guardhouse but he wasn’t worried. If he couldn’t bluff his way out he’d just run the gate. He slowed and made sure his scarf was wrapped around his face so that only his eyes were visible beneath the warm military usanka. “Fire! Fire, damn it! The Plant’s on fire!” He shouted the words, feigning alarm and pointing as he slowed to a halt before the guardhouse. “Someone call the duty officer!”

  He heard someone swear as the group of soldiers peered north at the dark mass of the Plant. He saw someone grab the telephone inside the guardhouse. “Hey, raise the gate!” he called. “I’ve got to alert the junction!”

  “Crap, he’s right!” One of the soldiers pointed at the distant Plant. Flames leapt from one of the windows and were licking at the exterior moldings. The troops guarding the gate were riveted to the spectacle of the burning Plant but seemed in no hurry to take action.

  “You want out?” one of them called.

  “Yes, raise the gate! If I were you lot I’d send a couple men up to the Plant before the whole place catches!”

  He didn’t wait to see what their reaction would be. A soldier shoved a counterweight down and the heavy metal bar raised, and Loginov sped off into the darkness.

  Tyuratam Gulag, Kazakhstan

  The hours dragged endlessly by as Hardin and Katia slogged their way through the uneven snow, staying as much as possible to the areas where the wind had scoured the steppe more or less clear. The clouds were thick and dark as far as Hardin could tell, and he wondered how long the relatively fair weather would hold. From time to time he swept the dark horizon with his binocular, but did not see anything but stretches of snow and empty steppe. By midnight they had left Tyuratam far behind, following Hardin’s compass northwest. Snow began to fall again but there was no wind, for which he was grateful. The desert terrain grew rougher, broken here and there by large rocks that jutted from the snow and small crevasses that had formed where natural watersheds had dumped their runoff. They paused only for infrequent rests and to melt a little snow in their mouths to drink. But by early morning, as a gray dawn pearled the distant sky, Katia’s face was drawn and pale. Hardin slipped his arm under her shoulders and she seemed grateful for the support. “I’m not used to so much walking in snow,” she explained with an ashen smile.

  “I’m tired too,” Hardin muttered. “I’m in better condition than you, Katie, but this is still tough going. Here, let me carry your pack. We should find the gulag soon. And you’re not drinking enough, either.” He knew she was an emotional mess from having to leave the village that had become her home, and that wasn’t helping her stamina any.

  “No, I’m alright. I think we’re getting close. See the rocks around? Better country for mining than down south on the flats. We’re following a low area between the hills and this would be where they would build a gulag.”

  But she leaned heavily on him as they struggled through the calf-deep drifts. “Hope you’re right, Katie. I’ll carry you if I have to but I won’t enjoy it.”

  “I don’t weigh that much.”

  “I didn’t mean I thought you were fat, damn it!”

  “I’m teasing you,” she murmured, managing a grin.

  “You women and your weight,” he grumbled. “Every relationship I was ever in I always seemed to spend more time talking about how much she weighed than anything else.”

  “Russian women don’t usually care so much. I suppose some do but not out here. Are there many women for you American pilots?”

  “I guess. If you want them. I always seemed to draw duty stations in out of the way places where there weren’t any. I haven’t been in a relationship for a long time. But I figure I’m better off that way.”

  “You like your life simple, and women are complicated!”

  “Something like that.” He shrugged. “I don’t know that I’d put it exactly that way but that’s about it. Imagine if I had to worry about what kind of mood you were in all the time?”

  “A woman is supposed to be moody. She is supposed to keep a man guessing. That way she is always interesting.”

  He rather imagined that with her such would be the case. “Well what about you? Have there been many men in your life? I don’t mean when you were a kid.” He steered her around a rough boulder.

  “Not really. A few, before. Then there was Kingfish but I never wanted him that way.” She stopped beside a small, jagged boulder. “I think something’s wrong. I think we’ve come far enough to be close, but I don’t see the gulag anywhere.”

  Hardin scanned their surroundings. “All right. Why don’t you sit here for a bit and I’ll go scout around, see what’s around here.”

  He trudged up the rise, leaving her sitting on the rocks. As soon as he crested the low hill he saw that the area opened up into a large, shallow bowl, and in the distance he saw the dark shapes of dilapidated buildings, long abandoned. He made his way quickly down the slope. “Looks like you hit it dead-on, Katie,” he called. “It’s ahead and to the left, about a kilometer.”

  “Good,” she sighed with a wan smile. “I’m ready to stop.”

  She rose and followed as he led the way up the rise, then onto a flat expanse of ground on the other side. “Look,” she said, pointing to a low hill a few hundred yards to the right. Hardin saw a few wooden poles jutting up from the snow and at the crest of the rise an old wooden lookout post. The post sat at the top of four stout timbers, weather-worn and similar to telephone poles, and was constructed of a wooden base supporting four smaller struts atop which sat a broken roof. The structure looked large enough for one, maybe two men. A few of the nearby poles still had rusting lamps fixed to them and a few strands of barbed wire twisted through the snow.

  “Guard tower?”

  She nodded, drawing closer to him, her voice tight. “They would have had a view of the whole camp from there. There was the outer fence, those posts there with the barbed wire. I hate this place.”

  “What were these places?”

  “The gulags were death camps. They were called things like ‘correctional facilities’ but they were really places people were sent to die. This is as close as I’ve ever been to one. Ordinarily the nomads would strip such places of metal and lumber, but they usually do not approach so close to the Facility.”

  He held her a little closer as they approached the old buildings, his arm around her waist. “It’s all right, Katie,” he murmured, trying to reassure her. “This is an old place. There’s nobody here but us.”

  But she shook her head. “There are ghosts at these places. The spirits of the dead.”

  “What, real ghosts?”

  “Real to me,” she murmured. “I feel them here. Around us, as if the zeks are still around their barracks, watching us from far away. Many died in places like this, either worked to death, or fell ill and were left to freeze, or killed by the guards. They were buried in common graves, somewhere away from the gulag. This is the true legacy of the Soviet Union.”

  “Now you’re giving me the creeps. But maybe one fisherman knows another from afar.”

  She managed a faint smile. “Where did you learn that proverb?”

  “Graham told me, back on the Bennington. I just remembered it.”

  “It means similar people are attracted to one another, they stick together. Is that how you meant it?”

  He nodded. “Whatever people were here, once, you’re one of them. You’re not one of the ones that put them here. Maybe they’ll know that.”

  “Maybe so.”

  They stood in the center of a flat area of steppe perhaps three hundred feet in diameter that fronted a larger hill. Before them, at the far edge of the draw, stood three broken-down buildings, low, flat structures resembling log cabins. Two were longer and had probably housed prisoners, one was shorter and smaller. All were partially overgrown by snow
-covered scrub brush. The nearest building’s roof had caved in, leaving a dark, jagged opening, but the remaining two seemed more or less intact. A metal pipe jutted up from each barracks building, rusted over now, and Hardin could easily imagine a plume of smoke curling from them. The buildings had no windows, just dark doorways missing their doors, and in the snow underfoot he could feel himself standing on pieces of wood. The wind had picked up again and it was bitter cold. “We should probably camp out in that smaller building,” he said.

  “No,” she said abruptly. “No, John. Please. I can’t go into them.”

  “All right,” he agreed, deferring to her superstitions. “Behind the smaller one then, out of the wind. Okay? That one probably wasn’t used by the zeks anyway.”

  “No, that would have been for the guards. I think there were more buildings here at one time but they’ve fallen down.”

  “I think we’d better risk a fire,” he mused as they drew nearer to the smaller building. “We’re cold and wet. We’ll build it behind this building so it won’t be seen if anyone comes along. But I think we need one to warm up and get us dry. Later we’ll put up the shelter.”

  They gathered some wood and found a spot behind the smaller building where the wind had scooped out a flat area. Hardin set about building a fire, feeling lucky that the snow was a cold, dry powder and the old wood inside the ruined barracks wasn’t too wet. After a dint of effort he managed to get a fire started and the heat was immensely welcome, for the bulk of the smaller building was not positioned to block all of the north wind. He found a few old crates lying in the steppe, a ways away from the draw, and they used two for seats. He removed his boots and set them by the fire to dry, motioning for Katia to do likewise.

  Katia’s color improved with the heat and some food from his pack, but she seemed badly rattled by the old gulag. Hardin understood her feelings without experiencing them himself; to him this was more like an old ghost town and reminded him somewhat of Rhyolite or Gold Point in Nevada, places he had visited on his Indian. “This place reminds me of home, some,” he offered, refilling their drinking tin with snow and setting it closer to the fire to melt. “I don’t mean we had places like this. But we had ghost towns where I was stationed.”

  “Ghost towns? What are those?” She fixed her dark eyes on him, seeming glad for the diversion of conversation.

  “Well,” he continued, poking the fire with a stick, “whenever there was gold or silver discovered out West, a town would grow up around the mine. Prospectors and others wanting to get rich would come to the town and work their claims, or work the mine until it played out. Then they moved on, but the town was left there. They’re still there, out in the desert, those old places.”

  “People weren’t sent there to work? They worked in the mines of their own free will?”

  He grunted an assent. “Of course. People wanted to get rich, so they came looking for gold. Towns had saloons, that’s bars or taverns, shops, girls, the whole thing. Sometimes people got rich and sometimes they didn’t. Most of the time they didn’t.”

  “The gold rush,” she nodded. “I have heard of that. In the Soviet Union people are forced to work in the mines. Did people die there?”

  “Sometimes. But mostly when they stuck their noses somewhere they shouldn’t have and got themselves shot. Some towns were rougher than others that way.”

  She seemed to consider his statement. “And they look like this, those places?”

  “A lot do. Without the fences and barbed wire. You usually see a lot of tin cans where the old towns used to be. People would just toss them into big piles and they’re still there. Yeah, this place sort of reminds me of home. But the ghost towns I know aren’t sad places. People went there because they wanted to. They give me sort of a feeling of history, but not a bad one like you’re feeling. I like them a lot. I visited them, sometimes, on my bike.”

  “I don’t know that I could enjoy something like that,” she murmured. “They would probably remind me of places like this.”

  “I don’t know, Katie. You seem kind of like the loner type who’d enjoy being on her own.”

  “That’s another American word. What does it mean?”

  “Someone who likes to be alone, off by herself. Uncomfortable in crowds, that sort of thing.”

  “Are you?”

  He nodded. “Pretty much. I like being off by myself. Flying is like that too. Crowds tend to bother me. I guess that’s why I don’t mind being stationed in the middle of the desert.”

  “I suppose I am, a bit. But…I don’t like to be alone.”

  “Aren’t you usually?”

  She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t mean I have to have a man or I need many friends, but more like…someone there, who I know is there. Not even close by, but somewhere I can get to if I need to. I don’t think I’m making much sense.”

  Hardin puzzled over her statement. “So…Kingfish was someone who made you feel not alone?”

  “No, not him. More like my handler in Kyzylorda.”

  “Katia, that’s someone who can make decisions for you.”

  She shot a hard look at him and appeared ready to give an angry retort. But abruptly she seemed to think better of it. “I don’t know. Maybe that’s part of it after all.”

  “You seemed awfully shaken up last night.”

  “Do you think I need someone to make decisions for me?” She seemed honestly curious, rather than spoiling for a fight as was her sometime tendency.

  He sighed, staring at the fire, finding himself oddly unwilling to meet her gaze. It was, he realized abruptly, a sign of his utter inexperience with women that he hadn’t the first clue as to how a steer the conversation onto matters more to his liking. If a woman did not have a ready predisposition to flirt with him, he had never bothered with the reverse. Somehow, in his pursuit of technical knowledge and ability, he had forgotten develop his skills with the opposite sex. Those now appeared to have atrophied.

  “Katie, how would I know? It might be. It sounds to me like you’re more comfortable knowing you’re not the only one making important decisions. That would be a lack of confidence, I guess. I mean, as long as you’ve been in this business how many decisions have you made for yourself? That really mattered?”

  “Not many,” she admitted. “I’ve done what I was told to do. What about you? Are you like that?”

  “Not at all,” he replied firmly. “I like to be in charge. I prefer to run the show by myself. I don’t like it when someone else sticks their oar in. I like to tell people what to do and have them do it. Except here, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of anything I know how to do. But don’t get me wrong, I’m way out of my element here and I guess it’s been bothering me.”

  She smiled, her face lit in the darkness by the flickering orange flames as he fed another board onto the fire. “So I’m hesitant to make decisions and you’re frustrated that you can’t. We seem to be quite a pair.”

  “That we do,” he agreed. “Does having me around make you feel any less alone?”

  She frowned at him. “Not really. Not in the decision-making way we talked about. It’s just different, with you.”

  He grinned sardonically, lighting a cigarette from a burning twig. “Great. How so?”

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever had this kind of a relationship with a man. Give me a cigarette?” He handed her one from his pack and lit it with his twig. “The way we talk, the things we talk about. Kingfish never talked much at all and the others, before, it was mostly the physical thing that Russian men want from a woman. You talk to me differently, and it’s not about physical things.”

  It was the kind of thing a girl might say about her brother. “Oh, I don’t know about that. The thought might have crossed my mind once or twice.”

  She laughed. “I don’t think so. You’re very odd for a pilot. Americans are supposed to be so degenerate and having sex always, but you are not like that at all. I think any Rus
sian pilot would have had a go for me this last week, even if they didn’t know me at all. But you didn’t.”

  To his surprise he felt his face flushing. “Maybe I was just too damn drunk to do anything else! This is a dumb conversation anyway,” he muttered, poking the coals vigorously.

  “I don’t think so,” she murmured with a quiet smile. “I don’t think so at all.”

  Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan

  Ushakov woke abruptly from an uneasy sleep to the sound of vehicle activity outside the SecurityBuilding. He sprang up from his cot in the small sleeping room and peered out the dark window. Weather was moving in again and snow was falling heavily. It lay piled in uneven layers about the building, drifting in some areas to three feet, in others only a few inches deep. Trucks were rumbling by on the access road from the launch gantry, seeming to head for the main gate, their headlights gleaming brightly on the snow-packed road. A glance at his watch showed the time to be half past midnight. He clamped down hard on the sense of panic he felt. What is going on?

  He could see the glow of flames coming from the distant Plant.

  He hauled his trousers on, stamping into his boots as he left the sleeping room. His heart pounded and adrenaline surged into his veins, driving sleep instantly from him. What’s happened? Where did the fire come from? This looks like an alert! Kalyugin, you bastard, you better not have blown this! The Director’s office was a short distance down the hall and he reached it in a matter of seconds. Kalyugin was on the telephone, and as Ushakov burst into his office he pushed a report across the desk to the chekist. Read this, he mouthed.

  Ushakov scanned the report, trying to remain calm. It was an Intelligence briefing concerning some PVO activity down in Uzbekistan; some P-14 operator had reported a suspicious aircraft somewhere southwest of Tashkent that resisted instructions and had ordered an intercept. If he was reading the report correctly there was some confusion over what had happened, but it appeared that two MiG-17’s had been lost and a third damaged, and yet another had vanished north into a weather front. When did this happen? He scanned the report header. Five days ago? “Yes,” Kalyugin said into the telephone. “That’s right. I’ll call you.”