by James Philip
The Raduga Kh-20 was old-style ‘heavy metal’, literally a bomb capable of flying hundreds of kilometres at a speed of up to Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, at altitudes of around twenty kilometres. It was more than a point, fire and forget dumb weapon; but not much more, and unless it was handled and deployed skilfully, with the utmost precision, it was as perfectly capable of blowing up its operators, as it was any distant enemy.
So, plodding, methodical technicians like Konstantin Konovalev were worth their weight in gold, or any other precious, rare metal one cared to think about.
Konstantin Konovalev, another sergeant, the thirty-three-year-old son of Don Cossacks forcibly exiled to the Far East in the mid-1930s, was Tatyana’s relief on long missions. In an emergency, he was also qualified to stand in as the aircraft’s radio officer. His brother and one of his surviving sisters had worked in the dockyards along the Amur River before the Cuban War, his parents had died in the late 1950s. He was the only member of the crew to whom this part of the USSR was remotely ‘home’, and even he thought that Ukrainka-Seryshevo was the back end of nowhere. Before October 1962, he had been part of a sprawling extended family with representatives in a dozen cities across the vastness of the Soviet empire, now there was just him, his older brother and younger sister, out here in the East. All the little ones were gone; Yankee bombs, hunger, disease, neglect had wiped out all the little ones, the old had died before their time, and it seemed to him that apart from his friends – the family of the Amerikanskaya Mechta – nobody gave a damn.
Junior Lieutenant Karl Osipov, was Olga Petrovna’s deputy and watch relief, responsible for the preparation, loading, systems configuration, launch and targeting of the Kh-20, or any other weapons systems carried on the aircraft. Still only twenty-five, he had been in his second Red Air Force sponsored year at the Chelyabinsk Technical Institute at the time of the Cuban Missiles War. With his rebellious mop of black hair and boyish good looks he barely looked old enough to wear the uniform, let alone to be potentially trusted with thermonuclear weaponry.
Olga knew Karl was sweet on Tatyana; had no idea if she had noticed, and so long as it did not affect his performance in the air, she did not care.
Of course, it was no accident that Dmitry Akimov had contrived to put together, and retain such an experienced and proven crew for his aircraft. Such was the privilege of all squadron commanders; or it had been in the old days. Nowadays, it would have been impossible without the active connivance of the top man at Seryshevo but then Dmitry and General Zakharov went back a long way.
All conspiracies needed such a cornerstone.
Something upon which to base its plans.
Olga Petrovna had no idea if all of the others were in on the plot; just that the members of the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s crew had been chosen very, very carefully.
She had still not made up her mind about whether, forgetting the necessity for somebody to get as close as possible to the base’s senior Political Officer, she would have, literally, got into bed with Andrei Kirov, had not it been deemed ‘operationally’ imperative.
As General Zakharov had explained, of all the ways to get ‘inside a man’s defences’, opening her legs was always going to be the most effective.
If the KGB man got suspicious, he would have to be dealt with but that was easier said than done, and even if he was just to disappear, all that would happen would be that another, perhaps more inquisitive replacement would arrive at Seryshevo. Or worse, one of Kirov’s underlings might emerge from his, or her, Vodka-induced stupor, open their eyes and smell the proverbial decomposing dead rat festering right under his nose. If anybody had bothered to follow the Special Weapons Inventory paper trail, somebody would have started asking questions about why Seryshevo had retained the components for two fully operational Kh-20s, when all that was supposed to remain ‘on base’ was a collection of useless spare parts awaiting scrapping. Or, for that matter, somebody might have queried why the orders transferring four more members of the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s – including Olga Petrovna - to a base outside Odessa, in the Ukraine, had been…lost in transit.
Olga shrugged against the warm, reassuring bulk of the KGB man. Dmitry had not said it but she knew he had been aching to urge her not to play hard to get with Kirov.
‘He’s the KGB’s big man at the base. He can get it any time he wants it,’ he had eventually complained, his exasperation bubbling over.
‘Yes, and if I come onto him like a complete slut he might wonder why,’ she had retorted, feeling a little guilty to be at odds with her commanding officer, whom she knew to be a good man and these days, treated her more like a niece than his Weapons Specialist.
In any event, Andrei Kirov had not made a pig of himself with another woman. Seryshevo was a closed society, so she would have known.
His voice snapped her out of her brooding.
“Was that serious?” The man asked, burying his face in the woman’s hair, nibbling at her left ear. “About there being a regulation that aircraft carrying a Raduga having to carry a political officer at all times?”
“Yeah,” she groaned, freeing her arm and squirming on top of him, her elbows resting on his hair-matted barrel chest. “Or a delegated officer from the Political Section. Obviously, in the old days there weren’t enough big men like you to go around!”
When he got back from Iraq, Andrei had been a bag of bones; it had taken him most of the last three-and-a-half years to be fully restored to the substantial fettle he had enjoyed before the war.
“The aircraft captain and the political officer both have to give permission for the deployment of ‘special’ munitions,” Olga explained dreamily. “Didn’t you know that?”
“No. I knew the Navy had some sort of arrangement like that. All Army units above Platoon-size used to have ‘politicals’; but I’d never had anything to do with the Air Force until I was sent here. When I got here, I discovered I was on my own. Literally, on my own. So, I decided not to rock the boat or make a nuisance of myself.”
“Very sensible,” Olga murmured, approvingly.
She lay on him a little longer, circled in his arms.
“I like fucking with a big man,” she declared. She ran her fingers through the coarse hair on his chest. “A great big Russian bear of a man.”
Kirov made a low, growling sound.
She laughed and levered herself upright.
Began to grind her wet groin against his and moaned softly as she sank onto his fast-aroused tumescence, impaling herself deeply and then, arching her back, taking him deeper, and deeper into herself. For a timeless interlude, making tiny movements of her pelvis she enjoyed him inside her, unconsciously raking his chest with her fingers as he reached for her, gently kneading her buttocks. Presently, she began to rock, backwards and forwards, rising and dropping down again with a slow, quickening rhythm, the erect nipples of her small, perfectly proportioned breasts painted black and crimson in the light from the glowing embers in the nearby fire. Breath came and went in increasingly ragged succession. She put one hand on his face, he sucked her fingers. And with a shuddering groan she collapsed on him again.
He thrust into her.
There was no resistance, she was slippery, quiescent and soon, was clinging to him, whispering incoherently into his ear, a rag doll in his arms before, in a whiplash spasm, he too, came, feeling in that moment as if he was emptying his very soul into her.
Chapter 11
Monday 22nd April, 1968
Camp John Whitcome Reynolds, Minneapolis
It had taken the Corps of Engineers a little over five months to create the sprawling complex on the eastern bank of the Mississippi some five miles north of the metropolitan centre of Minneapolis.
Three months after the sixteen-acre secure compound had been handed over to the US Army, many parts of the specially constructed Midwest War Crimes Tribunal (MWCT) compound were still, at best, works in progress. There had been a consensus that the MWCT ought to con
duct its business in a secure environment, and agreement with the rationale of accommodating the officials and the central administration of the MWCT in a single location, and that the accused and witnesses should be respectively held and housed in discrete locations within the complex, out of sight of the public. Likewise, it was recognised that there would have to be some provision made to look after visiting VIPs because there was nothing the Army – who were ultimately responsible for running the show – could do to stop the inevitable political grandstanding.
However, while the Corps of Engineers had constructed a superb template, everybody – absolutely everybody – involved in or with any half-legitimate interest in the MWCT process, had submitted lists of supplementary demands for this, that, and countless things they had forgotten to mention, or even think about in advance, not to mention whatever else they thought the US taxpayer could be gulled into stumping up for!
Nonetheless, after two delays, President Nixon had decreed – many suspected on grounds of domestic political convenience, to distract the media from the forthcoming trials of several of his associates in Washington DC, that regardless of what anybody else thought about it, Camp John Whitcome Reynolds – named for the murdered pre-Civil War Governor of Wisconsin – would commence its solemn business on the 22th April.
There was nothing special about that date; so, whatever his motives, it was generally assumed that the President was simply ensuring that there was one less thing for his opponents to beat him over the head with for a week or two!
Or at least, that was what Colonel Caroline Zabriski of the US Air Force Surgeon General’s Department, assumed. Richard Nixon had emerged from the period of the war in the Midwest with so much credit in the bank that most people honestly believed he could strangle the First Lady on network TV (not on prime time, obviously, even though the advertisers would have loved that) and get away with it. But that was back in late 1966 and this was the spring of 1968, election year, and the American people had discovered last year, if they had not known or suspected it before, that the President’s men had been spying on them all along. That was, Richard Milhous Nixon had been spying on them, flouting their constitutional rights with contempt because he did not think that the law applied to him, or to the rest of the organised crime family running the White House.
Such was Caro’s personal take on the situation: and it astonished her that so many of her fellow countrymen and women still reported to Gallop and the other pollsters, that they were, seemingly, if not happy then resigned, to vote for the scumbag again in November. So many, dispiritingly, that it was still likely – odds on - that the crook in the Oval Office was going to get rewarded for his perfidy with a second term in the big house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Today was a ‘ribbon-cutting’ day in Minnesota.
The President was in town to open the Midwest War Crimes Tribunal, with half the GOP at his back, eager to get in on the priceless photo-opportunity.
People seemed to have forgotten that it was exactly these same people who had been asleep at the wheel in late 1965, and whose negligence had allowed the whole dreadful catastrophe of the War in the Midwest to happen in the first place!
“It’s getting under way, Caro!” Caroline’s husband, Nathan, called from the living room of their brand new – they could still smell the paint – pre-fabricated residence in the north eastern quadrant of the camp.
Once things got fully started there would be a ‘senior’ tribunal for high profile defendants, and two ‘junior’ courts dealing with the foot soldiers of the abomination of the End of Days. Presently, the big networks were all broadcasting live, albeit with regular breaks for adverts, beaming the events in the crowded main tribunal room to the nation.
Caro wondered how long the TV cameras would stay when the headline ‘monsters’ had been tried, and duly executed for their heinous crimes against humanity.
The Zabriski residence, Number 3A, Madison Street, was only a short walk, literally two to three minutes, less if one was in a hurry, from Caro’s consulting room. Although there was a possibility that she might be called as an expert witness, especially during the first tranche of trials in the ‘senior’ tribunal, her main role at Camp John Whitcome Reynolds, was the pastoral and if necessary, psychiatric care and support of several among the courageous band of witnesses, two of whom were sitting in the less than luxurious, Army-issue chairs in the parlour with Nathan, as she re-joined the gathering of friends with the bowl of sugar cubes she had forgotten to bring out with the coffee a minute ago.
May Ellen and her daughter, Sally Jane had not wanted to be alone. Mother and daughter were survivors of the Madison ‘baby farm’, and been rescued from the Kingdom of the End of Days by Caro’s nephew, Sam and his subsequently murdered commanding officer, during the phoney war which had filled the months between the original uprising in Illinois and Wisconsin, and the outbreak of even greater mayhem in the Midwest at the start of 1966.
May Ellen had made Sam an honest man since then – their baby son was in the camp creche that morning - and they seemed really happy together.
Caro had feared that being removed from the sanctuary of Bismarck, North Dakota, where the couple and Sally Jane had made their home, was going to be an unnecessarily elongated and painful experience for them all. The trouble was that the Army, who were responsible for the organisation and conduct of the MWCT began with the misconception that witnesses were there for its benefit, at its convenience and that time was not really a major factor in the success of the MWCT. Caro had, therefore, had already had several fraught meetings with senior representatives of the Judge Advocate’s Department and the officers responsible for the administration of Camp John Whitcome Reynolds, intent on disabusing her almost exclusively male listeners of this, and other complacent, lazy and just plain dumb assumptions.
The witnesses were, to a man and a woman deeply traumatised ‘survivors’ who were in Minnesota voluntarily, solely by their own cognisance, and deserved the utmost respect and consideration. The Army did not in any way own them, or have any right to restrict their movements or contacts with the outside world and she was perfectly happy to talk to the press, radio and TV people at any time, if she found fault with the military’s attitude.
‘But you are a serving officer…’
This argument had cut very little ice with her.
“Fire me!”
No, that was not going to happen!
They knew she would just turn up again on the staff of one of the Charitable Foundations set up by wealthy philanthropists, patriots and by public subscriptions, dedicated to the welfare of the victims of the war. In fact, the Betancourt Foundation had offered her a ten-year contract in the event she was either, driven out of the military, or subjected to Pentagon-inspired disciplinary proceedings. Funnily enough, that offer, coming more or less out of the blue had opened her eyes to what she might do with the rest of her career – she had no intention of retiring, or quietly fading away – and was impressed by and attracted to the lofty aspirations of the Betancourt Veterans’ Medical Association’s broadly stated objective to ‘fill in the gaps left by the VA.’
But all that was for the future.
May Ellen’s husband, her nephew, Sam, commanded the 4th Battalion, North Dakota National Guard and the opening of the Tribunal proceedings had corresponded with the third of a four-week long-planned training deployment. Right now, his unit was in Nebraska taking part in a large scale war game run by 7th Armoured Division.
‘Getting to play with our new M113s!’ Sam had explained like a kid with new toys.
As soon as his Battalion returned to barracks, squared away its equipment and three-quarters of its members had resumed their civilian life, he had compassionate leave to travel to Minnesota but that would not be for at least another two weeks.
Sally Jane, eighteen now, had brought a stack of college work with her; but understandably, that was just a gesture. Mostly, she stayed close to her mother, a litt
le intimidated to be surrounded by so many men in uniform and the regimentation of the camp around her.
Caro perched on the arm of Nathan’s chair, her attention suddenly rivetted to the small TV screen, as she knew, would be tens of millions of other Americans in every corner of the continent.
She tended to understate, or if she could get away with it, deny her role in the drama about to play out before the nation and the world but in some ways, her role in laying the basis for the prosecution of the perpetrators of many of the most heinous crimes, had hardly been insignificant.
In what now seemed like a cruel trick of history, she had been a visiting attending psychiatric physician to the Illinois Department of Corrections for many years before the October War, and for over a decade, the one person Edwin Mertz, the dark angel of the Kingdom of the End of Days, and the psychopathic perpetrator of barely quantifiable crimes against humanity in his reign of terror in Wisconsin and later, the vast territories his legions had briefly conquered and occupied in the Midwest, would talk to subsequent to his incarceration in a high-security psychiatric hospital in the late 1940s.
Ironically, she would never have got anywhere near Mertz, had she not been working for the FBI on a twin-track project to develop criminal profiling techniques, and a reliable diagnostic methodology to classify psychopathy – specifically as it manifested in dangerous sociopaths and psychopaths – for the Bureau. Her past career had had more than one murky turn, at one time she had also worked for, and fallen out with the CIA in a big way, when she had refused to work for the Agency on a program delving into the possibilities of drug-induced mind control. However, it had been her work with Mertz which had made her reputation, and at one time raised her hopes that she might eventually achieve her then goal of becoming Dean of Psychiatric Medicine at the Chicago School of Medicine.
All those false ambitions, so much hubris, were in the past now. Not so her tranche of draft papers on Edwin Mertz, or the transcripts of her extensive interviews with Veronica Myles, the tragic woman who had fired into, and probably shot down the helicopter in which Mertz was attempting to flee the final savage battle of the Civil War, as US Rangers and British and Canadian special forces troopers, assaulted the maniac’s final redoubt, a heavily defended bunker complex outside the small town of Berlin, Wisconsin.