The Domino Conspiracy

by Joseph Heywood

  “Then that’s where he must be,” Melko said. Then in a whisper to Nestorev, “Draw a map for me and be quick about it.”

  “What’s that?” the woman asked.

  “Nothing,” Melko said. “We’ll have the colonel call when he comes in.”

  “It’s really not urgent.” The fact that she had called at all would tell him that it was. She hung up.

  Junior Lieutenant Nestorev shoved a map toward Melko. “Restricted area,” he said. “You can’t get in.”

  The urka smiled and retrieved his Red Badge. “With this I could fuck your sister on Lenin’s tomb during the May Day parade,” he growled as he picked up a telephone and dialed a four-digit number. Though it kept ringing, he acted as if he had gotten through to someone. “Recorder on?” he asked the phone, then nodded. “Yes, all outgoing and incoming traffic. Was that last one clear enough?” The phone was still ringing when he hung up. “Let me caution you,” he told Nestorev, “that all calls from this building are being recorded.” He guessed that this would delay any attempt by his comrades to warn Gaponov.

  When Bailov and Ezdovo arrived several minutes later, Melko climbed into the truck grinning. “His wife called in,” he told them.

  “She told us he left yesterday morning at eight,” Ezdovo said.

  “She told me he left a little over two hours ago in his field uniform, and she’s edgy. Gaponov’s people have some sort of restricted training facility near Vnukovo,” he added, and held out the hand-drawn map. “Several of his comrades are there. Maybe he’s with them.”

  Ezdovo made a U-turn and accelerated.

  132TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 1961, 7:17 A.M. Kashkin, Kalinin Oblast, Russia

  The Red Star collective farm was Pavel Abramov’s pride and joy—and, with the right blend of sun and rain, his future. Khrushchev demanded corn from state farms and Abramov had grown it; this fall he was certain this planting would produce a record yield, which surely would earn him not only a medal but promotion to manager of a larger operation. It was a sunny morning with low, fast-moving cumulus clouds racing overhead. Yesterday’s rain had been just enough to wet the rich black earth and perfume the air with its distinctive, scent.

  Abramov half heard the aircraft approaching, but paid no attention. His interest resided solely in the earth. Life was now and on the ground, not in some imaginary kingdom in the sky after death. “I believe only in what I can touch and see and smell,” he sometimes said to reaffirm the principles that guided his life. The earth was real, heaven debatable.

  It was a muted pop that finally caught Abramov’s attention, and though he had never heard such a sound before, he instinctively flinched before looking up. The aircraft had been approaching from the south and was nearly overhead, but when he looked up he saw two pieces, a wing and the rest of the plane spinning end over end in a steep downward arc, trailing heavy white smoke, the whole thing in slow motion. Abramov threw himself to the ground and covered his head, his only thought for his field. He would plant soon and the earth was perfect. Debris rained on him; there was fire everywhere and he was engulfed in a pall of suffocating black smoke.

  Abramov struggled to his feet. He was shaking, but he didn’t seem to have been hit. When he looked around him, it was not the carnage that struck him initially but the massive destruction to his field. Pieces of bodies lay everywhere and a fire poured heavy black smoke under a firm wind. He ran toward the farm buildings screaming orders.

  Abramov called his superior in Kalinin to report the accident, then joined his people who were already slapping the fires down with wet burlap sacks and shovelfuls of black dirt. Without bad luck a farmer would have no luck at all, he told himself.

  One of his people approached him. “Comrade Manager, what should we do with the dead?”

  “Put them in the ice house.” Why had such misfortune visited him at the very moment when his future seemed so bright? He felt like crying.

  133TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 1961, 9:30 A.M.Moscow

  Even with the map they had gotten lost several times and been forced to go through several guarded checkpoints. The small-arms range was in a windowless building on the perimeter of Vnukovo Airport. Several men were inside drinking coffee; the smell of gunpowder and strong tobacco lingered in the room.

  “We’re looking for Colonel Gaponov,” Bailov said.

  “How did you get in here?” a captain asked. When he reached for a pistol on the table in front of him Melko knocked him out of his chair.

  Bailov’s Red Badge gleamed in the artificial light. “It’s been a long and tedious night,” he said. And Raya had only one leg, which was his fault.

  “We haven’t seen him,” said a junior lieutenant with a tight face like a chipmunk and a sparse black beard.

  “How long have you been here?” Ezdovo asked.

  “I’ve been here all night,” a sergeant said in a weary voice. “He hasn’t been around and he isn’t scheduled.”

  They had parked near a grove of white birch trees. “Every time we get a lead it disappears,” Melko said as they climbed back into the truck.

  134THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 1961, 5:00 P.M.Kashkin, Kalinin Oblast, Russia

  Officially the Soviet Union had a near-perfect air safety record; that is, it did not report accidents unless they happened so publicly as to be undeniable, meaning outside the country or in plain view of too many foreigners. Despite its official position, however, the government maintained civil- and military-accident investigating teams, in part to determine the cause, but, more important, to sanitize the sites, warn survivors to keep their mouths shut and settle the damage claims of local residents.

  Captain Viktor Kostromin led his Moscow-based team to the Red Star farm. The carnage was considerable, but Kostromin had seen so many crashes in recent years that such scenes no longer affected him. Soon to be twenty-eight, he worried that such work was slowly destroying his ability to feel anything in the normal range of human emotions.

  The idiotic state farm manager greeted Kostromin with demands for payment of damages. Thirty-three men dead, and all he could think about were his fields. Unfortunately, he had been the only one to see the aircraft come down, so Kostromin was forced to interview him at length. Abramov was certain that there had been an explosion that separated the port wing and engine from the rest of the craft, and that he had seen two pieces falling. When his examination of the wreckage verified this, Kostromin’s interest increased. Most crashes were caused by pilots, or sometimes rivets popped loose or sheet metal collapsed, but it wasn’t often that one was sabotaged by a bomb with a sophisticated timer. What was even more interesting in this instance were the personal belongings that had survived, especially several identity cards with red slashes across them, and a wallet belonging to one Colonel Anton Gaponov.

  Kostromin did not linger at the site. By now his technicians knew how to take care of the details without supervision; what he needed for his report would come from what he had already seen and the photographs that would arrive in Moscow tomorrow. Basically it was a clean site. He wished Abramov’s people had not collected the bodies and their parts before he arrived, but done was done. A casket needed only a piece or two; fragments were enough to satisfy the living. For his part, he had seen what he wanted.

  His work complete, Kostromin drove to Kalinin and flew his own aircraft back to Moscow. Bombs were planted with intent. This one was a small one, ingeniously placed to make the crash look like material failure. It had been placed, he felt sure, inside the wing at the joint where the engine was attached to a main spar. Whoever had put it there was a virtuoso with explosive devices. Such experts were rare, and all of them no doubt worked under the protection of certain government agencies, the sorts of organizations connected to shadowy power centers in the Kremlin itself. Every artist had his own signature, and in this regard bomb makers were no different.

  135FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 1961, 10:45 A.M.Moscow

  Melko and Ezdovo split time at Gaponov’s office, each taking six
-hour shifts. They had found no evidence at the Vnukovo facility or vicinity, and the colonel still had not returned home. His wife was under around-the-clock surveillance by Bailov’s men, her phone tapped. They had checked aircraft departures, but all had been accounted for. It seemed that Gaponov had vanished.

  Ezdovo had reported everything to Talia, who urged him to be patient, this advice intended to have personal as well as professional meaning. “Everything will be fine,” she said, as much for herself as for him. She tried to think what Petrov would do, but she wasn’t Petrov, and though he seemed to be getting stronger, he was still too weak to help. Gnedin continued to insist that there was no hope. Talia sensed that everything had gone wrong and that they were still focusing on the wrong areas, but how could she redirect them? For his part, Khrushchev was busy preparing for the unofficial summit with the new American president. The meeting had not been officially announced, but the United States had tentatively agreed to it. Details were yet to be worked out, but it looked as if it would be in Vienna.

  Earlier in the day she had met briefly with the General Secretary. “Progress?” he had asked. He seemed to be in an unusually good mood, but disturbed. She had briefed him quickly, omitting their contact with the Americans. “Everything points to the Rocket Forces, is that your view?”

  “So far,” Talia said.

  Khrushchev grunted. “Wrong. Nobody in the Rocket Forces has anything to gain. Nothing at all.” The Ukrainian pulled back a curtain and looked out. “Perhaps I’ve made a mistake. Perhaps you were the wrong choice to take charge of this.”

  “Petrov is in charge,” she said.

  “He’s an old man,” Khrushchev said, watching for her reaction. “Filled with cancer.”

  How did he know? “He is Petrov.”

  “He was Stalin’s lackey,” Khrushchev said. “You move too slowly. I need people with energy around me.”

  “We need your plans for Vienna,” she answered. “Once you’re outside our borders it will be more difficult to protect you.”

  “If you do your job, I won’t need you in Vienna. I want things settled before I meet the American.”

  “You’ll be exposed in Vienna.”

  “The Foreign Ministry and the KGB are more experienced in such matters,” the General Secretary replied sharply. “Besides, there will be Austrian security, and the Americans will have their people as well.”

  “The Americans will concentrate on their own man.”

  “Since I will be with him most of the time, they will also concentrate on me. That’s exactly my point.”

  “We still need to review the security planning.”

  Khrushchev closed the curtain. “I’ll think about the request,” he said, ending the meeting.

  When Captain Viktor Kostromin arrived at Gaponov’s office, he asked who was in charge and was taken to Melko, who had just come on duty.

  “Where’s your uniform?” Kostromin challenged.

  “In your wife’s closet,” Melko snapped. This duty was too much like being a camp guard. The captain looked angry. “What is it you want, comrade?”

  “Information.”

  Melko smiled. “That can be a precious and rare commodity in the Motherland.”

  Kostromin laid Gaponov’s charred identity card on the desk. Melko read the name and asked, “Where did you get this?”

  “From the mud,” Kostromin said.

  136FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 1961, 2:00 P.M.Moscow

  The team was silent. Melko had brought the accident investigator to Talia, who had interrogated him for nearly two hours; when he departed his face was ashen. The bombing led upward, all right, too high. Talia had been blunt with Kostromin; he was to drop his investigation and forget everything he had seen; all records and files on the accident were to be delivered to her. “My mind is a blank,” he assured her.

  Now she had finished recounting the details to the team: Gaponov’s sudden and mysterious departure, now verified by his wife; the crash; Kostromin’s bomb theory and supporting evidence; his draft report, photographs, the remains of several identity cards, including Gaponov’s; a hand-drawn diagram of the crash site and of an aircraft wing showing how and where the investigator believed the lethal bomb had been attached. Kostromin was adamant: a bomb this sophisticated could have been assembled only by an extraordinary technician. How many such people could there be in the country? Such skills were too highly prized to go unnoticed by the authorities.

  Talia posed the question to Petrov, but it was Bailov who answered, the word out even before it registered in his brain. “Odessa. Special demolition development,” he said. “A modern-day Kamera.”

  In the old days the NKVD had a special branch called Spetsburo whose sole mission was assassination. The Kamera, or Chamber, was Spetsburo’s laboratory, which had the single purpose of developing more efficient methods of killing. The Kamera had been so shoddily run that legend said its operators feared to walk around it for fear that an accidental touch could bring instant death. Over the years there had been stories about equally bizarre operations. The Kamera was defunct now, abolished by Khrushchev, but Department 13 of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB had a similar operation said to be more scientific in its approach.

  “Why Odessa?” Talia asked. “Why only one facility?” It seemed an unlikely place for such an operation. Normally special installations were kept close to Moscow, where they could be regularly observed and tightly controlled. It was one thing to authorize such operations, quite another to make sure you didn’t become their target.

  “The weather is nice for bomb makers,” Bailov said. “Nice beaches, women in their underwear and blue sky to contrast against the black smoke.” He turned serious. “It’s an anomaly; its founder is a pilot who lost his leg to the Germans; when he couldn’t fly anymore he started experimenting with explosives. Why only one place? Soviet doctrine requires central control and a rigid chain of command. If you decide to create a special operation you put it out of the way and organize it so that only the most reliable people are employed there and at every level of control in its chain of command. There is only one plant in the country making rubber boots, only one making washing machines and only one manufacturing secure radios. Should we be surprised that there is only one laboratory producing special explosives? This place developed what Spetsnaz calls a vibration charge, an all-plastic mine that metal detectors can’t find. Pressure from above pushes a plastic fuse into the device; the fuse pierces a pocket of chemicals that heat it and ignite the charge. It weighs half what a standard mine weighs and delivers several times the punch. Anyone who can make something so insidious would have no trouble with the type of explosive used to kill Gaponov, and I remind you that the chief designer there is a former pilot, which means that aircraft hold no mysteries for him.”

  “How many people know about this place?” Gnedin asked.

  “To my knowledge, not many. We had problems with the nine prototypes and I raised hell about it. The chemical reaction was supposed to occur almost instantaneously, but some of the devices took an hour; in the heat of summer we had several explode before they were primed. I was sent to meet a man named Chelitnikov. I spent a day in Moscow with him and described the flaw. After that we got new mines that worked as they were supposed to.” Bailov shook his head. “He was not what I expected, and seemed to talk more than listen. A very peculiar man. He told me all about his base, which is near Odessa.”

  Petrov thought for a moment, then turned to Talia. “Gaponov’s former assignment?”

  She thumbed through the dead colonel’s dossier and found the entry. “Odessa Military District,” she said. “There’s no other detail.” Petrov had seemed only to glance at the file earlier; had he picked up such a detail with so little effort?

  “Lieutenant General Babadzhanyan commanding,” the little man said with a grandfatherly smile. “It’s on the next page.”

  Talia found it exactly where he said it would be.

  “Chel
itnikov invited me to visit him,” Bailov said. “I’d say it’s time to accept his invitation.”

  “It may be another blind alley,” Talia said.

  “Perhaps. But if he didn’t make this bomb he may know who did. He’s an artist, and every artist knows who the up-and-coming competition is.”

  III

  Alert

  137MONDAY, MAY 1, 1961, 10:30 P.M.Milan

  Frash spotted the woman in the morning, and from time to time during the day he came back to see if she was still there. Thirtyish, with curly black hair, a dirty face and dangling copper earrings, she wore a faded red dress, no shoes and carried a fat infant in her arms. She had taken up a position under the central dome of the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele and played the role of beggar well, but she and the baby were too healthy; her panhandling was a job rather than an attempt to survive. Twice he saw carabinieri escort her out of the glass-roofed mall, but each time she made her way back. Frash admired her persistence as much as her gall. He guessed that she was a Gypsy.

  He had moved constantly for a week, walking and hitchhiking by night and sleeping in abandoned buildings by day. Along the way he had thrown away his clothes and stolen some blue coveralls from a cement factory before purchasing new clothing in Milan. He realized that something was wrong with the blank passports. It had been a surprise to have his first one checked by the hotel clerk when he had left the Excelsior, for shortly thereafter the Americans had come snooping. He doubted that they were on his trail now, but it seemed likely that they had some sort of a net out for him. In a pinch he could stay in transient hotels, but it would be safer to find someone to take him in, somebody who knew how to live in the seams of life. The gypsy seemed a possibility.