by Greg Ahlgren
“Yes sir.” Rostov cleared his throat. “It was in my report, sir.”
“Presumably Dr. deVere wants to go back in time to undo the Soviet takeover of America.”
“Comrade Nikitin has discussed that possibility with me, sir.”
“No doubt. But Comrade Nikitin speaks only in general terms, Igor. As you know we need detail. We need to know who, what, when, where and how.”
“Of course, sir.” Igor leaned forward. “Couldn’t we just arrest the lot, sir?”
Petrovchenko tilted his head back and roared aloud. “Or have them all killed? We could use our Comrade Nikitin for that, I suppose. Given her training at the academy and all. No, Igor,” he continued returning his focus, “we can’t do that. This is why I’m in charge and you are not. First of all, who do we arrest or kill? Do we get them all? If we miss one he or she will become more secretive, recruit others, and eventually try again. If you have ants in your house you must get the nest. And do not kill any ants until you have followed them back and discovered where the nest is. Do you see?
“I suggest improving the quality of the reports you put on my desk, Igor. If that means putting your foot up this Natasha’s ass, be my guest. If that means assuming personal supervision of the operation that wouldn’t be a bad choice either.”
“I understand,” Rostov said.
“Do you?” Petrovchenko asked, leaning back in his chair. “Tell me Comrade, do you think I have forgotten how a good operation should be run?”
“Of course not.”
“Do you take me for a fool?”
“Of course not,” Igor repeated, starting to squirm.
“Let me tell you something, Comrade Rostov,” Petrovchenko said, leaning forward again and jabbing with his finger. “I know very well how to run an operation of this type. In my younger days I ran many operations like this one. Your Comrade Nikitin is an insolent bitch. And I knew very well how to deal with problems like the one you are having here with her. Do you think me too old now to still do that?” Petrovchenko asked accusingly.
“But Comrade,” Rostov protested, “the Descendants, as they call themselves, are not like the older generation of resisters and anarchists. They are very careful.”
Petrovchenko snorted. “Yes, Comrade, but I am careful too. Very careful. You don’t get to my position without being careful and always having a back-up plan. One must know how to get around the Descendants, just as you should know how to get around this Comrade Nikitin if she is not doing her job, or doing it for someone else, no?”
“Of course, Comrade,” Igor agreed.
“As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking, it might be good for your career, for your future with the agency, to get in a little more field work,” Petrovchenko said, suddenly becoming more friendly. “They say Boston’s lovely this time of year.”
“They do,” Igor agreed, relieved at the change in the conversation’s tone.
“I notice you were once posted in Boston.”
“That’s right,” Igor agreed again.
“I imagine you’d like to get back, it might make a more effective meeting with your Comrade Nikitin. Why don’t you go for a few days? I’ll personally see that you get rooms at the Copley Plaza, it’s said to be the finest hotel in the city.”
“The Copley?” Igor asked. “I’d appreciate that, sir.”
“Yes, well, we like to keep our best men happy. I think if we can pull together on this Boston operation we can give your career quite a boost,” Petrovchenko said.
“Yes sir, I agree sir.”
“Absolutely,” Petrovchenko beamed. He checked the paper calendar on his desk. “Why don’t we say in a couple of weeks after you finish up with that problem in Chicago? Would that be enough time to prepare?”
“That would be fine, sir,” Igor added, almost as an afterthought.
“Grand. I’ll have Stasha make the arrangements. Make sure that you leave a list of ongoing operations you’d like me to keep an eye on in your absence,” Petrovchenko said.
With pleasure, Igor thought as he smiled, shook the man’s hand, and left.
Wednesday July 22, 2026
“Natasha, Igor here, no doubt you’re out sampling the finest French restaurants in Boston while we gnaw on dried beets back here in Yeltsengrad. I’ll be in Boston at noon two weeks from this Saturday, so do please pick me up at the airport. And do pack your bags. I’ve decided to transfer you to the Charles River apartment. I think you should be closer to the action. I’m convinced something’s going to blow soon. Having you–”
“Igor!” Natasha picked up the phone. “Serious? I’m moving to the Charles River place? No strings attached?”
“You mentioned vodka?”
“All you want.”
“If that’s the best I can get.”
“You wouldn’t like me,” Natasha said. “I can’t cook.”
“Neither can my wife,” Igor said. “Two weeks. Write it down.” He hung up.
The Charles River apartment. Natasha punched the pillow as she sank back on the bed. Hot damn!
In his Yeltsengrad office Rostov tapped his pen on the desk. His ears were still ringing from the blistering Petrovchenko’s superior, a man he knew only as Vanya, had given him when he learned Natasha was in Dorchester. Whoever her patron is up in the hierarchy he’s sure watching out for her, he thought. Must remember that.
Chapter 11
Friday, July 24, 2026
“All right. What happened with the chronometer?” Lewis asked.
Paul looked around the Friday night crowd at The Marbury, an off campus nightclub, and put his hand over his mouth to start talking.
“Hold your glass up,” Amanda said. “Looks less suspicious.”
Paul held his glass up–and stared past Amanda at the crowd. Out on the dance floor the college crowd was jamming the too small parquet floor while the older patrons–and Paul ruefully put himself in that category–kept to the surrounding tables.
“That’s one way to keep them from listening in, don’t say anything,” Lewis said. “Come on Paul, it’s clean.”
“Natasha,” he announced, putting his glass back down.
Lewis turned to look. Natasha came by the table with Nigel.
“Rather a surprise seeing you here, didn’t know this was your cup of tea,” Nigel said as he shook Lewis and Paul’s hands. Natasha smiled at them and at Amanda. Lewis and Paul smiled back. On the giant video monitors The Rolling Stones Experience kicked off a 65th Anniversary tribute tour from Phoenix.
“Professor Hutch’s birthday, so we thought we’d surprise her,” Lewis said.
“Surprised?” Nigel asked her.
“Quite.”
“Cheers, and happy birthday,” Nigel said to Amanda as he led his date back out on the dance floor.
“Cheers,” Amanda said, wiggling her fingers at them. The three watched as the pair boogied to the far side of the dance floor.
“Well, fancy that,” Lewis said. “Think she’s on to us?”
Paul shrugged. “This is the hep spot, if they’re going out they’d probably come here.”
“I don’t know,” Lewis said, drumming his fingers on the table along with the Stones. “It’s strange. I’m convinced she’s probably Agency.”
“How do you become convinced that something is probably the case?” Amanda asked mischievously.
“Well, she’s Russian. She lands in our department just when we start up on this for real. But on the other hand she does live in some hellish part of Dorchester.” Lewis kept his eyes on the pair as they began dancing on the floor.
“Dorchester?” Paul asked.
“Would the Agency ever put anyone there?” Amanda asked. “Especially a number like that. Plus, her educational background’s legit.”
Lewis stared momentarily at Amanda and appeared about to speak when Paul interrupted him.
“Anyway.” Paul held up his glass to his lips as he told them that the day before he’d sent the chr
onometer back to 1923, kept it there until 1933, and brought it back. “It worked perfectly.”
“Hot diggety dog,” Lewis said. “This calls for a drink.” He hoisted his whiskey and took a long hit. When he was done he exhaled approvingly, momentarily studied his raised glass, and then put it down. He turned to Amanda.
“Paul tells me you have something for us.”
Amanda nodded. “It’s the Cuban Missile Crisis,” she said. “That is the pressure point. That changed everything.”
Paul finished his drink. “The event we need to undo?”
“If you’re looking for a one-shot strike, something that can be accomplished by two or three people, I can’t think of a better place to intervene,” Amanda said.
“Why?” Paul asked.
Amanda sighed. “In 1962 the United States had, hands down, the best military in the world. The Soviets didn’t even have a navy. Not one to speak of anyway. They had a Communist government in Cuba that Eisenhower approved being overthrown in early 1961 with an invasion by a ragtag group of Cuban expatriates trained by the CIA. But Kennedy got elected and wouldn’t commit American air power to support the invasion. Without air support the whole campaign fell apart at the invasion point known as the Bay of Pigs.”
It was Lewis’ turn to nod. “One of history’s blunders. We studied that operation, the CIA recruitment of the Cubans, the training process, the battle…” he grimaced. “Studied it all in school.”
Paul discerned Lewis’ pause before saying “in school.” It was often Lewis’ euphemism for military training.
“Kennedy’s decision had a number of long term effects,” Lewis finished.
“It had three big ones,” Amanda continued. “First, right wingers in the U.S. believed that Kennedy was soft. Second, Khrushchev realized that he needed to do something to strengthen Cuba’s hand if Castro were to stay in power. And third, Castro himself realized that he needed to expand Communism to South and Central America if he was ever going to challenge the U.S.”
“That was 1961, though,” Paul protested.
Amanda nodded. “In response to all this Khrushchev sent missiles to Cuba which could be loaded with nuclear warheads. In October of ’62 Kennedy found out about them and a debate erupted in the administration as to what to do.”
Amanda leaned across the bar room table toward Paul. “I’ve listened to the tapes of the meeting. Every one of his advisors recommended invasion to remove Castro and Cuban Communism. Senator Russell, Senator Fulbright, General Curtis LeMay, everyone. The risk, of course, was that Kennedy feared a nuclear war.”
“Was he right?” Paul asked.
“No, absolutely not,” Amanda answered. “Khrushchev never would have done it. If Kennedy had invaded Cuba the U.S. would have won and there never would have been any Ché Guevara to foment a Central and South American revolution. As it was Ché was almost stopped in Bolivia except he was saved by General Lee.”
“General Li? Chinese?” deVere asked
Lewis rolled his eyes. “No, an American traitor who had defected to Cuba and joined the Cuban guerillas. Named Lee. He later became a general and won a crucial battle at Acapulco. We studied his campaigns in training school. They became the blueprint for Communist guerrilla activities everywhere.”
“Oh yeah.” Paul remembered the picture of the thin-faced man on the wall at the Kennedy Library Exhibit. He had forgotten his name. “Any relation to Robert E. Lee?”
Amanda snickered. “No, no relation to Robert E. He was O.H. Lee. Anyway, Ché lucked out. A successful invasion in ’62 would have made Kennedy wildly popular and may have given the U.S. the courage to stay and fight in Indo-China. As it was, the American military advisors were pulled out in early ’64.”
“So, what do we do?” Paul asked. “How do we convince Kennedy to invade Cuba in ’62?”
Amanda sipped her beer. As a waitress drifted close she held up three fingers. She waited until the waitress had moved away before answering.
“We don’t,” she answered. “The press does. We use an indirect approach. First, we get cash. As a history professor I can get access to the old American money plates at the museum and can print up a bunch of old United States money. Real paper and everything. Every so often someone will do it for a party or Halloween or something. It’s not a big deal. Obviously, the currency is no good today but valid in ’62.” She smiled. “At least we’ll be rich.
“Second, Lewis gets us all communicators with extended energy packs. No satellite communications back then but strong scrambled radio transmitters with coast-to-coast range.
“Third, three laptops filled with scanned newspaper articles from the New York Times and Washington Post. And of course, three printers since they’ll be none there.”
Paul nodded. “Anything else?”
“Firearms,” Lewis answered. “Just in case.”
Amanda shrugged. “That’s up to you. I don’t need any. But anyway, gun laws were more relaxed back then before the Soviets took over.”
It was Paul’s turn to shake his head. “It was that damn NRA and their idiot president. First thing the Soviets did was go to the NRA building in D.C. and grab the member list. They didn’t need gun registration. Once they had that, they were able to eliminate 85% of the private gun ownership in the country.”
“But not their bumper stickers.” Amanda smiled.
“Then what?” Paul asked. “How do we use the newspapers?”
“The two most important newspapers were the New York Times and the Washington Post,” Amanda continued. “We approach Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post and Harrison Salisbury at the Times, prove who we are by showing them copies of the newspaper articles from the next day’s papers which we’ll bring with us, horse racing results, etc., and convince them of the need to go to war. William Randolph Hearst was once able to convince the United States to go to war against Spain–we can do it again.”
“And?”
Amanda raised her eyebrows.
“What happens if Kennedy changes his mind and invades?” Paul asked.
“He also might not pull out of Vietnam. Pulling out was a mistake.”
“He should’ve stayed in?”
“They called it the Domino Theory,” Amanda said. “There’s a guy nobody remembers today named John Foster Dulles, but he was brilliant. If anybody knew what they were talking about back then, he did. His theory was that if Vietnam goes, next goes Laos, next goes Cambodia, one after the other, next thing you know all Indochina’s Communist. Which is exactly what happened.”
“Do tell,” Paul snickered.
“Exactly,” Amanda said. “I’m of the opinion that without Castro to worry about, Kennedy would have stayed in Vietnam. Even if we change just one thing, maybe the first domino never falls and worldwide domination by the East is stopped in its tracks. If we stop just one country from going we might stop it all, and preserve our western way of life.” She snickered. “We wouldn’t be living under a bunch of goddamn civil administrators hand picked by Vodkaville.”
“Hell of an assumption,” Paul said.
“Got a better one?” she challenged.
“Hey, that’s why you’re here,” Paul said. “You’re convinced of that?”
She sighed. “No, but it’s the best I’ve got.”
Paul raised his glass before remembering that his beer was already empty. The waitress had not yet arrived with the refills. Ordinarily he would have stopped at one, driving home and Valerie smelling it but tonight, tonight… He put his glass down. Amanda was the historian, she’d forgotten more 20th Century American history than he’d ever known, but still, there had to be something more certain than that.
“So we go back to change Kennedy’s mind in October of 1962,” Amanda continued. “I say we go back earlier, say mid-summer, do the drum beat, stay through the Cuban missile crisis to make sure Cuba gets invaded, and get out of there in the late fall returning here the day we left. We won’t even miss one faculty meeting. Othe
rwise we give Ché and Ho Chi Minh a free pass, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“Why even screw with trying to start an invasion?” Lewis asked suddenly. The pair turned to look at him.
“That can’t be that certain a thing to do,” Lewis continued. “Why not just go after Ché Guevara himself? We know where he’ll be in Bolivia in 1968. I can pin point the day and locale where they almost got him. Let me train 12 guys-two snipers with eight or ten for perimeter protection-and we can find a wormhole back to the spot a few days early, set up an ambush, and wormhole right back afterwards leaving him dead in the jungle. That seems a lot better than hoping we can convince a bunch of newspaper guys to convince the public to convince Kennedy to start a war.”