by John Meaney
Poor bastards.
Beyond the bridge, I climbed the slope to a vast empty plaza. Behind me was the sweeping river and the city's grandeur. In front rose a grand building, reaching up into the heavens with a narrow golden spire, a Soviet star at the apex.
Three students passed me.
"—sending you, once you graduate?"
"Vladivostok."
"Bad luck, Petya. I'm still aiming for Leningrad."
"Let's hope you—"
In the Soviet Union, on graduation, students go pretty much where they're told: refusal is discouraged. Trailing the students across the paved space, I reached the main building then headed for the physics department. Soon I was standing in a high echoing corridor, outside the door of a lecture theatre, listening.
"—does an aeroplane fly?" The rough tones were familiar: my pal Vanya.
There was a rustle of cloth. Students, raising their hands.
"Yes, yes, Mr Petrovitch. What is the explanation?"
Trust Vanya to call someone gaspadeen rather than tavarisch. Failure to use 'Comrade' could be seen as a sign of 'cosmopolitanism'.
"Um, it's Bernoulli's equation, Professor," came the student's voice from inside. "The shape of the wing. The flow lines are bunched closer together on the top, so the air must flow faster. So the pressure's lower."
At least the student wasn't claiming that it was a Russian scientist, rather than Bernoulli, who had discovered the relationship between pressure and flow. The equation says if you squeeze flowing fluid into a narrowing pipe, it flows faster. This was a textbook answer. (And I remembered telling Professor Bazargan in Paris that the standard picture of an atom is a lie. In the apartment where I'd last seen Fern.)
"That's fantastic!" Vanya's voice boomed. "You've just proved that a plane can never fly upside down."
"Er..."
At that moment a bell rang, denoting the end of period.
Seconds later, students poured out, paying no attention to me. When they had all left, I went inside. Vanya was wiping the blackboard clear. He stopped.
"My word. David." His beard bristled when he smiled. "David Wolf. How wonderful to see you."
"Likewise, my friend."
Too bad I couldn't ask him to call me Alexandr Fyodorovitch.
"Let's get some tea," he said.
We went to a staff room where a samovar stood, with a group of faculty members gathered around it. Vanya fetched two cups of tea while I waited, and then told me to follow him. "I'm alone in my office," he added. "My friend Sasha is in the low temperature lab."
"What's wrong?" I said. "Isn't the heating working?"
"Ha. Funny, Doctor Wolf."
I really didn't like him using my name.
Tea in hand, we passed two students who were trying to decide whether Einstein's two relativity theories should be renamed – "Velocities have been modelled as relative since Galileo, and it's the constancy of light-speed that was the breakthrough" – which was the same argument I'd had at their age, and just as pointless then. Vanya winked at me, then stopped in front of a door, and went inside, to his small, cluttered office. Once the door was closed behind us, I felt less exposed.
"I just wanted to chat," I told him. "This is not an interview."
He knew me as a science writer, nothing more.
"No one told me you were coming, David."
"They didn't know."
"Ah." And, after a moment: "Really."
"So how's physics," I said, "in the light of dialectical materialism?"
"According to Engels and Lenin" – a half-smile grew on Vanya's face – "the universe is infinitely old, infinitely large, and infinitely subdivisible. Atoms cannot possibly exist."
"And Hiroshima and Nagasaki never happened."
It was Einstein's letter to Roosevelt that kick-started the Manhattan Project. Perhaps it was regret, as well as the persuasive powers of T.E. Lawrence, that caused Einstein to accept the position of New Jerusalem's president. I knew that Albert Einstein was a genius of the kind that is born maybe twice in a millennium. I thought also that he was a probably a good man, who did not deserve to die with a sniper's bullet in his brain the moment he stepped onto Russian soil.
Or perhaps I was beginning to believe a story concocted by Ignatieff. Lies can be seductive: witness the misconception of atoms as tiny solar systems, or the schoolbook explanation of how aeroplanes can fly.
Vanya sipped at his tea. "We model reality as if it contained atoms. That makes it a mathematical fiction, so that the weapons programme can continue to... but these are matters I should not discuss. Not even with a friend."
I let out a long breath.
"There are reasons I'm here, Vanya, which are entirely in the Soviet Union's interests. No one wants any harm to come to President Einstein, when he lands the day after tomorrow."
The world can change in an instant. It took six-tenths of a millisecond for the first seventy thousand victims to perish in Hiroshima. I could see enlightenment click into place behind Vanya's eyes.
"What do you want?"
My memory was of a conversation in Zürich, at a conference in the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule. We had walked, Vanya and I, along the ETH's central neo-Renaissance gallery. Parallel balconies ran overhead, with spherical lamps on curlicued metal stands, unchanged from Einstein's student days.
Vanya had complained about the lack of rigour in his latest work, a State-directed project to model the flow of people and planes through the airport north of Moscow.
"I was hoping you might have a map," I said now, "of Sheremetyevo Airport. The kind that shows hangars, cargo bays, the lot."
Two hours later, I was lying prone in snow, covered in a white sheet for camouflage, and freezing. A snowy wilderness ranged to either side and behind me. In front and below stretched an electrified fence guarding the snow-covered runways and half-buried hangars. The night was murky, thick with incipient blizzard. No planes were flying in these conditions.
Zadok might be a decoy set up by Ignatieff, or he might be a real and mortal danger to an eighty-four-year old man who deserved to live for more years yet. I had to find out.
The ground was freezing. I remembered Paris, and the neophyte standing out in the cold, watching Fern and me.
So what are you up to now, my love?
I crawled forward in the snow.
FIFTEEN:
SHEREMETYEVO, December 1962
The nearest guard tower stood maybe a kilometre to my left. The three figures up top were probably colder than me. Warm guards are dozy guards, and the High Command knows that.
At first glance, the easiest way through the boundary was directly under the tower, where it bisected the electrified fence. But the Soviet High Command knew that too, and the ground would be mined and booby-trapped.
Ever-thickening snowfall was decreasing my visibility.
A gap between flurries revealed a distant dog patrol on the other side of the fence. The dogs were red-furred, half-Husky; their handlers were KGB Border Guards. Their job was to prevent defectors from boarding Western planes; their success rate was one hundred percent.
Nearer the fence, the spotlights were static and overlapping. Beyond stood a second, inner fence. It didn't need to stop you, only slow you down enough so that someone was bound to spot you, then the alarms would sound and the dogs would bark, and a single crack or the stuttering thunder of machine-gun fire would follow, shutting down the world, ending everything.
The snow was falling harder. My shivering felt as natural as breathing, the normal condition of life, as if I'd been lying here for days instead of an hour. Time to commence my crawl.
A cough sounded through the snowfall, quickly killed.
You bastards.
I'd lain quietly but so had they. Correction: one man for sure, some four hundred metres away at a guess. He wouldn't be the only one. This might be additional security for Einstein's visit, because you'd think that with all the other layers of prot
ection they really wouldn't need snipers in place. I knew that no one had spotted me, because the universe still existed, my personal world not yet ended, cogito ergo sum, but not if I froze to death, so it would be nice to get moving, for God's—
White heaviness crashed down without sound, a hushed mass of snow, and then the wind began to moan, announcing the blizzard, a killer or a lifesaver, and the outcome was up to me. With cold snow smashing into my face, I began to crawl forward. After a few moments, or perhaps ten minutes – the blizzard was disorienting – I had to stop, trying to check that I really was heading for the fence.
Come on.
Call it faith, but I had to trust myself. Here, grass lay buried beneath the snow, and I pulled out some long blades before crawling onward. Howling turbulence, white and bitter cold, surrounded me, threatened to fling me up in the air like Dorothy in the—
Wire.
Sweet bleeding hell, but I'd almost blundered into it. The wire was right in front of my face. Horizontal strands perhaps ten inches apart. With my bare fingers, I used the grass blades to touch the lowest wire.
Nothing.
The next one up looked identical, but the tingle in my hand was immediate and the grass fell from my grasp. There was no way of measuring the voltage but fatally high seemed a safe assumption. Going under seemed the best way, so I began to dig with my hands beneath the lowest wire.
The ground was iron-hard.
"Shit."
My digging became snow clearance, unable to penetrate the soil. Soon I had a shallow gap with minimal clearance. There was only one way under the wire, which was without my outer clothing. The cold could kill me as easily as a bullet but there was no choice, and my overcoat was off before I could think it through.
Do it.
Down to my shirt, I pushed my bundled clothing through the gap then crawled on my back – so cold, so hard – trying not to – careful – catching my trouser leg – watch it – and finally I was through, rolling on to my knees, shaking.
The blizzard intensified as I pulled my clothes back on. I'd lost body warmth, and all I could do was crawl on while the snow battered me, uncaring. From observing the patrols I knew there was a clear path, but whether I was following it was impossible to – look out – and I stopped, then stretched out numb fingertips – something hard, metallic – and it was a lost buckle, not a landmine – thank God – and I laughed in relief.
But beside the buckle lay a dark-green pressure plate, and if there was one, more would be lurking, ranged in place, in staggered rows. Mines, ready to blow my world apart.
I slowed right down.
The bad weather held, shielding me but threatening to kill me. My bloodless hands managed to feel for another mine, and then a third. For twenty minutes or a hundred years, I crawled, and then the second fence was in front of me. This time I crawled underneath without taking off my coat, then pushed snow back into the trench I'd made. The blizzard thickened even further. The air seemed solid.
Duration is relative, Einstein said, and time slowed down in my struggle against hammering snow. By the time the hangar's outline became visible, I felt decades older.
From inside the building came a familiar kind of shout. Men, fighting. Inching up to a window, I found a clear patch and peeked inside. Some were doing flick-flack somersaults, others were cutting down imaginary enemies with entrenching-tools. Sparring, someone threw a scything kick, downing his opponent, following with a controlled knee-drop to the throat.
An Alpha Team.
The Spetsnasz would have recruited these men from the KGB Border Guards, who were already hard cases, then forced them through levels of endurance training that few people could imagine. Yes, I'd been through the mill, but so had these men, and there were two dozen of them, conditioned to work as a team, while I was hanging out alone with my arse in a blizzard.
I moved back into the thick of it.
Hangar 17 was Vanya's best estimate of where I should aim for. If he was wrong it didn't matter; it would become my temporary base until I found the right one. But it all depended on getting my bloody fingers working, as I fumbled and dropped the feeler gauges, trying to work on the lock. I was outside and shelter was inside and in between it and me was this sodding lock, and I've opened the things a thousand times in practice but that was when it was warm and my fingers were nimble, and do you think that might make a difference?
Shit shit come on.
It took ten minutes and I dropped the picks twice more before the lock sounded thunk and opened, and I fell inside. The door banged shut, pushed by the wind, and the lock clicked back into place.
The world began to sway.
Relative silence and a cessation of turbulent pressure made me dizzy, so I moved to the side of a portable cabin set against the hangar wall, then slid down and sat on the floor.
And then I woke up.
Oh, bleeding shit.
Sleep had dropped on me without warning, in the aftermath of fatigue and the disappearance of imminent threat. The snow must have died while I slept, because no sound came from outside... except the rumble of a truck.
Truck. Outside.
That was why I'd woken.
So I rolled to my feet and scanned the hangar's interior – huge, almost empty, save for a light aircraft in the rear with half its panels off, steps on wheels left at an angle beside it, and the big cabin behind me. The cabin would be the engineers' office. It had a flat roof, and there was junk all around. There might be a space behind it, between the cabin and the hangar wall, but for now, the top of the cabin looked good enough.
There were voices outside.
Hollow vertical girders formed the cabin's corners, and I went up the nearest one, hurting, and swung myself sideways, rolling across the cabin roof and flattening myself. The small door in the side of the hangar opened, and two engineers came in.
I closed my eyes, fighting to control my breathing, trying not to make a sound, wondering why the hell I'd ever thought Branch 7 would be better than a normal life.
For a long time I lay on the cabin roof, inside the hangar itself, while the engineers opened up the cabin underneath me. They switched on heaters and, by the sound of it, a kettle. My breathing shook, then steadied.
"Hey, comrade. Looks like the soldier boys are visiting again."
"Another inspection? Shit."
A third voice said: "Don't let them hear you say 'soldier boys'. They're Spetsnasz, in case you didn't know."
"That's right. Bad asses."
"Look, the kike president's coming to visit, and his plane's going to be in this hangar. What did you expect?"
Bingo.
This was where I wanted to be. What I didn't know yet was whether Zadok, as Andropovitch, was working here. He would probably attempt the hit – if he really was the GRU-trained killer that Ignatieff had led me to believe – somewhere in the airport grounds. Why else go to the trouble of setting up the Andropovitch identity?
"You mean Einstein is coming to our hangar, right?"
A hush fell on the engineers, and my own back tingled.
"My God."
"Right. Albert fuckin' Einstein, in our hangar."
"Wait till I tell the wife."
A jeep pulled up outside, and under cover of its noise I wriggled backwards along the cabin roof, until my feet touched the hangar wall. As the first of the soldiers entered – "Inspection time again, comrades" – I descended into the darkened gap between cabin and hangar wall. There was enough junk piled on the sides of the cabin to hide the narrow space. Fear was with me now, every single moment, flowing through my blood.
Please God don't let them see me.
Spread-eagled, I pushed my palms and knees against the cabin, my back against the hangar wall, trusting to friction and counterpressure to hold me in place.
The soldiers began their search.
"Sergeant? What about the top of the cabin?"
"You could look from the steps." He meant the mobile steps o
n wheels, used by engineers to work on planes. "Or you could get your arse up there. Right now."
"OK, Sergeant."
Despite everything, I had to smile. If Brummie Greenmore had been Russian, he'd have sounded like that.
The cabin shook with the soldier's weight as he monkey-climbed his way up the side then stepped on to the roof, and walked towards the centre. If he came to the edge and looked down—
"All clear, Sergeant."
"Then what are you hanging around for? There's a plane back there to check."
"Yes, Sergeant."
It took them maybe ten minutes to check the place over. And then they were gone.
"This bloody compressor," one of the engineers said. "Andropovitch, could you give me a hand here?"
"Look, you need to—"
The compressor rumbled into life. One of the engineers was called Andropovitch, and unless the universe was taking the piss, he had to be Zadok. This was him.
My muscles began to cramp. It was impossible to move. Eventually, long after my body had passed through pain to the numb place that lies beyond, the men stopped working.
"You think everything's ready?"
"Yeah. Want to work on that hydraulic pump?"
"That's not on the schedule, is it, Comrade?"
"Well, no. Not until the visitor's gone. But we could..."
"Screw up the supervisor's work plan. You want that?"
"No..." Glasses clinked together. Perhaps they contained more than tea. "Don't know what I was thinking of."
At lunchtime, they left the hangar, and drove off in a small truck. My stomach rumbled. I used the space behind the cabin to pee. It's the little things that catch you out. Then I pulled myself up onto the cabin roof and lay there, recovering.
Remembering Fern in Leningrad. That single perfect night.
My warm daydream when the engineers returned. They spent afternoon shift chatting more than working. Finally it was time for them to go. Most of them were heading for a particular bar. One of them, the one I thought was Zadok, begged off.