by James Philip
“Comrade General Zakharov wants one of these birds put back together and its comms re-enabled so we can at least feel like we are still training for the real thing.”
Andrei Kirov gave up any attempt to flirt.
“But not with a warhead?”
The woman gave him a disappointed stare for some seconds.
“Of course not. If we ever get one of these Radugas flight-ready again – which would be a not so minor miracle - we’ll fly with a dummy payload. If we flew empty the weights would be all wrong, the centre of gravity would be in the wrong place. We might even crash on landing.”
“Seriously?”
Kirov had studied Political Science and Marxist-Leninist Philosophy at Moscow University in the mid-1950s, excellent preparation for a career in the security apparat of the state. However, technology was a mystery to him, especially the mechanics of flight and advanced weaponry. Before the Cuban Missiles disaster, learning how to jump start a broken down staff car had been the absolute limit of his intimate relationship with the inner workings of the machinery that powered the modern age.
Again, this prompted another look of disappointment from the attractive blond weapons specialist who had seduced him shortly after his arrival at the base.
Seduced him and thereafter behaved towards him like he was a stranger.
“Anyway, why train with these things,” he gestured at the dismantled missiles, “if we ever had to use them then, well, it would probably be the end of everything?”
Olga scrunched up her face.
“I thought the KGB was supposed to be looking out for signs of defeatism in the proletariat?” She shook her head. “Would the end of everything be so bad, Comrade Commissar?”
Kirov’s mouth flapped open, and then shut as the woman walked away from him, circling the flying bomb as if he was not there, intent on studying every rivet, screw and element of its exposed workings.
Without conscious volition, he trailed after her.
Much in the fashion of a faithful hound.
“I don’t know,” he confessed, belatedly.
He suspected she had stopped listening.
His family was gone; perhaps, her family was gone, too.
If he was a zealous kind of Political Officer, he would have read her personnel file by now. But he was not, and he hated delving into people’s secrets unless there was a very good reason for it. They were all rootless, isolated out here in the wilderness, a cold oasis in a landscape dotted with smashed cities and torched forests. He had opted for the military wing of the KGB at the earliest possible moment in his career, precisely not to be one of the trench-coated operatives who spent their whole lives spying on their fellow citizens. Military security was different, it had a real purpose. Not that he would share that particular insight with another living soul; it was odd how so many useless zealots had survived the cataclysm, and so many real patriots had died.
“That’s why you are so unhappy,” Olga replied tartly. “Why are you here?”
Andrei Kirov did not know what to say.
The thing about being a Political Officer, especially miles from anywhere at a place like Ukrainka, was that in theory at least, if a man wanted a quiet life then he could have it. He knew he was not very good at the political, or the spying part of his job but conversely, he was intelligent, resourceful and accustomed to bullshitting for the Motherland. In other words, he was content to go through the motions providing nobody went out of their way to piss him off.
The trouble was, these people at Ukrainka seemed to be going out of their way to do exactly that. Major General Zakharov needled him every time their paths crossed, people in the Officers’ Mess shunned him and whereas everywhere else he had ever been, his in-tray was regularly stuffed with denouncements and sad fuckwits were continually knocking on his door, attempting to curry favour with him, here, all he got was routine requisitions for his signature, the occasional file to peruse, or if he was lucky, one of his KGB troopers to bawl out for returning to barracks so drunk he had pissed in somebody’s locker in the middle of the night, or tried to bugger the man in the next cot!
Oh, and the most attractive woman for miles around had inveigled him into a quick fuck, probably, it now seemed, as some kind of dare or joke.
At his expense, obviously.
It got worse: “We fucked that one time,” Olga Petrovna went on. “That didn’t mean anything to me. I never pretended it did. Do you want to fuck me now?”
“I, yes, no…”
“I’m busy, anyway.”
“Okay…”
Olga tried to return to her work.
She looked to him with no little irritation
“You’re still here, Comrade Commissar?” She asked, clearly having hoped he would run away with his tail between his legs. She scowled and shook her head.
They looked at each other.
“You’ve read my security file,” she said accusatively.
“No, I haven’t, actually.”
“Oh, I thought that was the first thing a new Political Officer did. Apart from fucking the local talent,” she added disdainfully.
“Is that what you do?” The man retorted, his face burning. “Fuck the new PO to get on his good side?”
Olga Petrovna thought about this.
“No, not as a rule.” Her eyes narrowed momentarily. “You really haven’t read my file?”
“No, it isn’t flagged for attention. Should it be?” The KGB man was feeling stupid. “I heard you were some kind of hero. I’m here to catch enemies of the people, not Heroes of the Soviet Union!”
Olga thought this was so funny she could not help but smirk.
It was very hard not to laugh out aloud.
“You’re certain you work for the KGB, Comrade Commissar?”
Andrei Kirov knew better than to rise to the bait.
In another second he would have turned on his heel and angrily stomped out of the hangar.
“I was a missile technician, first grade, on the day of the Cuban Missiles War,” Olga said. “I was based in the Kazakh Republic.”
The man was rooted to the spot.
His brow furrowed.
“What were you doing that day, night?” Olga asked, matter-of-factly.
“I was stationed at Chelyabinsk. Attached to the Kursk Bunker Protection Battalion.”
“Guarding a gang of senior Party people?”
Kirov nodded.
“But not when the English bombed it in 1964?” The woman followed up,
Kirov shook his head, grimaced ruefully.
“No, I was in Baghdad by then. I was too busy trying to stay alive to worry about any of that shit.”
The woman had halted, crossed her arms across her breasts as if she was suddenly feeling the chill in the air.
There was no trace of levity in her voice when she next spoke.
“I was in Kazakhstan with the 33rd Guards Rocket Army,” she shivered involuntarily. “I programmed the target co-ordinates for one of the last R-16s we got away that day.” She frowned harder when she saw the question in the man’s eyes. “I sent it somewhere around the American Great Lakes, I don’t know where. Maybe, I made a mistake and it went off over the Pacific or the Arctic.” She sighed. “The bastards lit off the fucking rocket without checking I was in the emergency launch pad bunker. There were four of us on the gantry, I was the only one that survived.”
General Zakharov refused to open the Red Air Force service record files of his dwindling flight crew cadre; so, Andrei Kirov, even had he been interested, had had no opportunity to pry into the ‘official’ pasts of the Tu-95 crews. As for the KGB security files on personnel at Ukrainka-Seryshevo, he placed so little credence in anything in those files that as he had honestly told Olga Petrovna, he never bothered to read them unless they were ‘flagged’, a status that obliged him to familiarise himself with their contents on pain of the sort of disciplinary consequences no sane person needed.
He had reported
Zakharov’s ‘bad attitude’ and ‘uncooperative stance’ to HQ, and been informed that the Base Commander was ‘an awkward customer’ and told not to push him too hard because he had Politburo-level ‘connections’. It was this latter consideration which, presently, meant that nobody was overly keen to directly confront Zakharov over a relatively minor matter of protocol. That said, it would be exactly the sort of thing which might come back to haunt him if, at some time in the future, he crossed the wrong person, or strayed into questionable ideological waters, or if the climate of suspicion regulating the security apparat of the Far East changed…
There was also the fact that Seryshevo was going to be shut down as a bomber station sometime in the next year; interceptor and reconnaissance squadrons would move in and Zakharov, and those who shared his old-fashioned, possibly ‘maverick’ tendencies, would be reassigned, or retired at that time. In the meantime, Seryshevo was a backwater, and nobody’s career was worth risking just to make a point over a has-been air force general.
Leastways, not while his father-in-law was still a member of the Politburo, even in these days when that august body only existed to rubber stamp the Troika’s – effectively, Chairman Shelepin’s – decisions.
Andrei Kirov absorbed what Olga Petrovna had just said.
“That must have been pretty shitty,” he sympathised.
“The Yankees bombed Semipalatinsk to dust, we all got exposed to a lot of the hot stuff,” Olga went on. “I got sick; I was lucky to survive. She patted her belly. I bled a lot. I was lucky, I just got to be barren. Although who’d want to bring a baby into this fucking world is a mystery to me. The doctors gave up on me at one stage; but after so many of our best people were killed in Iraq, I got called back. They don’t need techs for the big rockets anymore, I don’t think we have any,” she shrugged, “but,” she reached up and touched the leading edge of the nearest flying bomb’s starboard wing, “we’ve still got plenty of this old tech. So far as I know, if it’s put together the right way it still works.”
The KGB man was lost for words.
Thinking about it, they had never had a proper conversation. They had flirted, if verbal jousting counted as flirting, and once fucked with all the tenderness of rutting farmyard animals. But they had never talked or threatened to exchange intimacies, let alone revealed any meaningful part of themselves to the other.
“I’m the only one in my family who survived the war,” he offered. “And you?”
“I was sweet on a guy, a nurse I met when I got out of hospital. He was in Basra when that shithead Gorshkov blew it up. No, I’m the only one left. I had three older brothers, I loved, and hated them, as little sisters do, but they are gone.” Her blue eyes suddenly glinted with twisted self-deprecation: “People usually ask me if my life flashed before me, when I was on top of that tower programming the guidance system of that fucking R-16.”
“Did it?”
“No, the fucking slide rule was shaking so badly in my hands I had to do the calculations five or six times before I got the same answer twice. I don’t even remember replacing the inspection panel when I was finished; I just threw myself at the ladders, slid down the zip line so fast I burned my hands…”
“I didn’t know about any of that,” Andrei admitted sheepishly. “Sorry.”
“Okay, is it true that the CO keeps all our air force files – the good ones, not the shit you people put in our security records - under lock and key in his office and won’t let you see them.”
“It is. True, I mean. But that’s okay, I hate reading people’s personnel files…”
“You really must be a crap Commissar?”
It was Andrei Kirov’s turn to shrug.
“Shoot me,” he suggested ruefully.
Olga Petrovna thought about this.
She reached out, her fingertips touching his chest. It was a strangely tender, almost possessive gesture; a moment of emotional ambiguity that confused both of them.
“One day, maybe,” she murmured, breaking contact by curling her fingers. “One day. There’s no hurry, Comrade crap Commissar.”
The man chuckled.
And to his astonishment, the woman…giggled.
Chapter 7
Friday 8th March, 1968
Concord, New Hampshire
Gretchen Betancourt-Brenckmann did not understand what had gone wrong. She and self-doubt were customarily strangers; so, this morning’s disappointment weighed on her like a ton of bricks. In fact, she was to all intents, inconsolable, except to show as much in public would have been an unforgivable faux pas.
I screwed up!
I got everything wrong!
Nobody will ever trust me again!
Such were the unfamiliar thoughts looping around her consciousness as she took a very, very deep breath, threw one last grim-faced smile of defiance at her father-in-law, tossed back her head, squared her shoulders and stepped out onto the steps of the New Hampshire State House to confront what she assumed was going to be a derisively small gang of reporters.
The last time she had looked – about a quarter-of-an hour ago - there had literally been a couple of men and a stray dog in the near deserted square awaiting her and her candidate’s appearance in the cold, grey morning. Because of this, she was almost relieved to be greeted by about a dozen pressmen and photographers.
Almost relieved because the notable absence of even a local radio jock, let alone a TV crew, said it all about the abject ignominy of last night’s results. The Democrats of New Hampshire had delivered a crushingly dismissive blow to the campaign she had poured her heart and soul into over the last year, and there was absolutely no rational, or plausible way she was going to be able to put a remotely positive spin on it.
Okay, so they had known McGovern was going to be a serious contender, especially with Eugene McCarthy pulling out so early in the race. But to come in fourth behind that red-neck bigot Wallace, and Teddy Kennedy, well, that was just plain humiliating. Even worse, if that was even possible, fourth had almost been turned into fifth by Scoop Jackson!
Jackson had not even troubled to show his face in the State!
People had told her not to trust the feedback from the informal caucuses in California, Iowa, Boston and DC; but at least the Brenckmann for President campaign had been in the frame in those ‘toe in the water’ events, not shot down in flames without warning.
In retrospect, the lack of media interest in those pre-primary outings ought to have told her something very, very important. Insofar as people were interested in who the Democrats fielded in the General Election on Tuesday 5th November, it was generally assumed that the real contest for the Presidency was going to be between the incumbent, Richard Milhous Nixon and his amiably thick-eared fellow Republican, the former B-movie hack, fifty-seven-year-old Ronald Wilson Reagan, even though everybody in the two men’s adopted home state of California, knew that the latter’s real target, most likely, was the Governor’s seat in Sacramento, not Washington DC. With the Republicans firmly in control on Capitol Hill, and far too busy gerrymandering electoral districts all over North America to the GOP’s advantage to worry about the state of American democracy, the Party was perfectly happy for the Nixon-Reagan charade to play out, if only to starve the Democrats of the oxygen of free national publicity.
And that was always going to be a big, big problem for Gretchen’s champion. What she had singularly failed to understand – really understand, or to absorb the implications of – was the reality that while her man had the gravitas and the vision to challenge Richard Nixon, the Democratic Party was perfectly happy carrying on tearing itself to pieces refighting battles it thought it had won a century ago.
Thus, her guy had been marginalised by a starry-eyed liberal (McGovern), a racist segregationist whose politics would have not been out of place in Jefferson Davis’s 1861-65 Confederate regime (Wallace), and the youngest of the Kennedy brothers (Edward), who was only standing because…he could, or possibly, as a Trojan Hor
se proxy for his elder sibling Bobby to discover if the Kennedys were an irredeemably busted flush outside of Massachusetts.
So, instead of tearing into Richard Nixon’s crooked White House cabal, or keeping up the pressure on the criminals in charge of the CIA and the FBI, instead of demanding that the constitutional rights of all Americans were inviolable, or reflecting on the sense of betrayal of so many first, second and third generation European immigrants over the proposed Sverdlovsk Summit ‘carve-up’ of Central Europe, the other Democratic front runners were squabbling amongst themselves over the soul of the Party, and by attempting to stand above the fray, Gretchen’s man had never even got to the starting line in New Hampshire.
Gretchen’s guy had tried to talk about ‘the big picture’, to question the assumption that Uncle Sam had some kind of God-given right to determine the fate of nations of which it, and its people knew little and apparently, cared less. People had blinked at him in bewilderment when he pointed out that the next likely flashpoint for conflict was Taiwan, and that the logical consequence of China’s ongoing Communist ‘long march’ was the leftist – and in places, separate and antipathetic Islamic - infiltration of South East Asia, Indonesia and inevitably, Japan and the Philippines, all of which were endangered by the Administration’s policy of focusing ever-more onto the Soviets, to the exclusion of all else.
The Chinese Nationalist fortress of Taiwan, and the corrupt former French southern half of Indochina, did not have to be the first Asian ‘dominoes to fall to the Communist Chinese but American aggression might easily condemn the whole region to decades of misery. Presently, the Communist regime in Chongqing was rattling sabres over Taiwan; but that was all it was doing. The United States could live with that, contain it; whereas, rebalancing its military might to point at the Chinese mainland and the seas about its coasts, was both wasteful of resources and a wholly unnecessary provocation. How would Americans react if a foreign fleet threatened California, or Florida, or heaven forfend, Long Island?
Had the Nixon Administration forgotten so quickly that when the Soviets had based missiles on Cuba – ninety miles off the US mainland – it had caused the war to end all wars?