by James Philip
And that was before they started widening the conspiracy.
They had had to bring Marco Pevkur in on it; there was no way they could fly up to half-way around the world in their ‘American Dreamer’ without the best flight engineer in the business being in on the deal. The Tu-95 would have to be nursed all the way and even then, she might still fall apart at the seams.
An airframe was only the sum of its thousands of parts and each of those ‘parts’ had a designed in-service lifetime. Most obviously critical, were the four Kuznetsov NK-12 engines, one of which was an original 1958 installation and the other three were all pre-1962 builds. By rights all four engines should have been replaced by now, or at least rebuilt with a significant proportion of their key parts replaced. Likewise, the gearing for the 5.6-metre diameter eight-bladed contra-rotating propellers – the reason the Tu-95 was so loud was that those blades rotated faster than the speed of sound – would have expired had it not been for the endless workshop hours devoted to them.
Hence, without an engineer like Marco on board, they really would be pissing in the wind!
Presently, they were a gang of five, and that was the way, ideally, it was going to have to stay until practically the last moment. Pragmatically, there were far too many people in the know; a loose word, even something one of them unknowingly muttered in their sleep – face it, they all had the worst kind of nightmares – might condemn them.
Tatyana stood away from the schematics.
“Chairman Shelepin will be going to Malta in a few weeks,” she said. “He’ll make peace with the Yankees. Then he won’t have any use for us any longer, boss.”
Olga was so astonished by the other woman’s temerity that she was briefly, lost for words.
“We don’t know that.”
“Pravda says that the war is over; and that the reconstruction must begin,” Tatyana insisted, her voice trailing away. She had not meant to question or to offend Olga. “I’m sorry, I know…”
The newspaper of the Communist Party of the USSR, Pravda, Truth, spoke for the Troika, not the proletariat.
“You mustn’t believe everything that our Commissars tell us, Comrade,” she was assured, gently but firmly.
“No, you are right…”
“Our duty does not change just because Pravda reports something,” Olga continued, exhibiting a calm she no longer felt.
The Party had abandoned the Revolution.
Had the struggle been for nothing?
Had all that death and suffering been so the new Tsars could go cap in hand to the conquerors like peasants reliant upon the charity of their latest overlords?
Olga blinked, realising that the other woman had said something to her.
Tatyana was gesturing at the schematics. “Is that why we are installing all this modified equipment, Comrade Specialist?”
Olga did not immediately understand what was behind the question. Its apparent obliqueness cloaked its disconcerting underlying directness.
“It is always best to fly with the best available kit.”
“But we don’t need it,” Tatyana pointed out apologetically. “We don’t need any of it, any of the old stuff, I mean. We only need the upgraded components if we were expecting to be ordered to deploy a Kh-20. Instead of doing all this unnecessary work we could be stripping weight out of the airframe to reduce normal flight stresses on the aircraft…”
Olga watched the penny drop.
Sometimes, questions answered themselves that way.
“Oh,” the other woman whispered. “But we are not authorised to operate with Kh-20s, Comrade?”
Olga could tell it was all Tatyana could do not to glance over her shoulder for fear of their conversation being overheard.
“Yes, we are,” Olga replied softly. “All we have to do is put one of those condemned carcasses in Special Weapons Store Number Two back together,” she went on, suddenly breathless, “configure it to work with the new Mark Three guidance box, sort out the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s on board search and tracking radar, and figure out how to boost the output of the targeting transmitter, and,” she smiled a very nervy smile, “sling the beast under our belly, and we’ll be back in business.”
The two women looked at each other for five, six, seven seconds.
“Why do we do this?” Tatyana asked simply.
Olga thought about telling her the unadorned truth.
No, that would have been a bad mistake.
“For our honour; and for the honour of the old Red Air Force.” She forced a grimace. “Besides, it is either that, or we can just carry on going stir crazy out here in the middle of nowhere!”
Chapter 16
Tuesday 7th May 1968
West Wing, The White House
The President and the First Lady had spent Easter in California where, despite their years in DC, the Nixons still felt most at home. It was an oddity of fate, and politics, that two such private people should have found themselves front and centre on the world stage for so many years, an oddity that even in quieter moments when the howls of the ‘Liberal-Commie’ media briefly subsided, that had taken a visibly cruel toll upon them both. Like so many of the people of their generation whose careers and young adult lives had been half-formed when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, that war had determined much which had followed; with it had come personal and societal dislocation, opportunities and deep-seated emotional scars, and despatched the future first couple down a road neither of them could have foreseen, or in truth, desired.
Superficially, the Administration still looked intact, likewise most of the leading members of the President’s inner circle had thus far, survived the scandals, accusations and the myriad of investigations into the Warwick Hotel Scandal, and the never-ending fallout from Operation Chaos.
However, Richard Nixon was under no illusions: all that stood between him and perdition was a grasping, possibly senile old man at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (J. Edgar Hoover), a charming, oily opportunist at Langley (Richard McGarrah Helms) occupying the seat of the Director of Central Intelligence, and a jumpy, increasingly erratic broken reed of a man (John Mitchell) who had long since become a laughing stock, at the Department of Justice.
The Administration’s position was so perilous that if J. Edgar Hoover had another one of his ‘absences’ or ‘rages’, or went missing again for nearly two months as he had when his old buddy Clyde Tolson had dropped dead in his office from a massive cerebral haemorrhage last July, there was no telling what would happen next.
Similarly, if Richard Helms at the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that his own least-worst option was to ditch the Administration, and to throw himself upon the mercy of a re-shaped, post-November Congress, or perhaps, confide in one of the no-hope Democrats fighting to stand for the Presidency in November, then the White House would be doomed.
However, the real nightmare scenario was that John Mitchell, at Justice, would stop behaving like the crooked bond broker he had been when Nixon brought him in to block the Warwick Hotel investigation, and finally buckle under the unrelenting media pressure. The man had to know that his only way out was to opt to make a plea deal with the Democrats in Congress sometime between now and the General Election in November.
Things had got so bad that even though the GOP had massive majorities in both Houses, the Democrat talk of impeachment would not go away.
A lot of that was being stirred up by the self-righteous pronouncements of that sanctimonious bastard Ronald Reagan in California; trust a fading B movie star to paint himself as the conscience of the fucking nation!
The man was standing against him in the West Virginia, Nebraska, Oregon and Florida primaries later this month, and in addition to his home state, California, also in New Jersey and South Dakota, and all the polling predicting Reagan was going to hurt him.
It was treachery, a stab in the back, betrayal!
“How the fuck did Cronkite get that interview with Brenckmann?” Richard Nixon dem
anded sullenly, clunking his coffee cup down so fiercely the others in the Oval Office were a little surprised that it, and its saucer did not shatter.
Last night, CBS had transmitted the newsman’s interview as part of an hour-long piece, allegedly a documentary about the Brenckmann for President Campaign, filmed in Massachusetts and West Virginia since Easter.
Former Ambassador Brenckmann and his wife were seen meeting miners filthy from their shifts underground, holding babies, glad-handing through crowds, and strolling through the ruins of Quincy as if they owned the fucking place!
‘I wish I could be like that with the people,’ the President’s wife had confessed to him as the couple had viewed the ‘special program’ last night.
There was something vaguely, maddeningly saintly about Joanne Brenckmann. You just knew that she was the sort of person who was always going to cry with you, and to be there for you when you needed her. Worryingly, registered Democrats seemed to have belatedly worked out that her husband, unfailingly courteous and dignified, unflappable, with a voice rumbling with authority, was precisely not the kind of bleeding heart liberal – George McGovern, for example - that the GOP longed to tear to pieces that fall.
Walter Brenckmann had as good as admitted that he had already given up on the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party, and that meant he was coming after the soft liberal left of Nixon’s own Republican base out there on Main Street.
‘The South will do what it has always done,’ Brenckmann had smiled at Cronkite. ‘That is their right; but the Confederacy lost the war a hundred years ago and I don’t give a damn what colour a man or a woman’s skin is, we are all people under the sight of God and when I am President all Americans will finally be equal under the law!’
The man had said outrageous things, every word spoken in a stern, level tone occasionally punctuated with a self-deprecatory grimace that positively oozed sincerity.
‘During the war in the Midwest, the President of the United States promised the American People that in admitting his culpable negligence, he would not run for a second term; that, it seems, was a lie. While all this was going on, the President oversaw Operation Chaos, a monstrous conspiracy to spy on the American people. This infers that it is a self-evident truth that the President has little or no respect for the Constitution, Congress or for the rule of law. We are talking about a President who has surrounded himself with shyster lawyers, men of demonstrably negligible moral rectitude and let’s say it the way it is, crooks. We all know that at time he and his Administration sleep-walked into the war in the Midwest, the main focus, possibly the only focus of the White House was covering up its criminal complicity in the Warwick Hotel Scandal. The President and his cronies were so preoccupied frustrating the investigation into the Administration’s misdemeanours, and its related, criminal conspiracy to discredit Doctor Martin Luther King junior and his supporters, and thereby to do down the whole Civil Rights Movement, that they allowed American cities to be nuked by a bunch of psychopathic religious zealots. By what right does that man still sit in the Oval Office? I don’t know about you, Mister Cronkite, but I think the time has come for the man in the high castle to be brought down to earth!’
Only a few weeks ago, the President had been complacently watching the supposedly re-built Democratic Party fragmenting before his eyes. There had been the real prospect that he was going to end up running against George McGovern in the North and the West, and Governor George Wallace in the South. Even if McGovern managed to get main stream traction elsewhere, it was guaranteed that Wallace would cut him off at the knees.
“It’s a Kennedy-Betancourt coup!” Richard Nixon complained, his voice ragged. “Don’t those people in New England see what’s going on?”
Of the inner circle who had swept into the White House in 1965, few of the senior members remained. Although John Mitchell’s Department of Justice – these days a hive of leaks and internecine feuding – had contrived, against all the odds, to sit on its hands, state prosecutors had not, and Judge Earl Burger, the unexpectedly formidable man appointed to investigate the whole Warwick Hotel imbroglio, had shown himself to be doggedly implacable throughout. Each new indictment ate away at the shield of Executive Privilege, undermining the President’s, and his White House’s mandate of silence and non-co-operation with investigators and the lower courts, delaying and delaying until the evil day when one of the blocked cases was finally appealed to the Supreme Court.
It ought not to have surprised anybody that the main reason the GOP Majority Leaders in both Houses had so persistently attacked – nit-picked in the main - the various confidential, much-leaked, drafts of the Warren Commission’s Report on the Causes and Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, had been to tie up the schedule of the Chief Justice and to lengthen the Supreme Court’s logjam of cases awaiting a hearing. However, Earl Warren had now declared a halt to the ‘review phase’ of his Committee’s deliberations, finalising the report and inviting any members of his panel who so desired to present their own version of it: with the caution that ‘I have already signed the only version of the report which will ever be published over my name!’
That had all but killed the shameless stonewalling and filibustering in recent weeks. After the Chief Justice’s remarks even dullard members of the House had got the message: there were no votes left in raking over the bones of the dead.
That was not to say that there was any respite in the attacks on the acknowledged drafter of the report, Ambassador Brenckmann’s son, Dan, which fitted in nicely with the GOP’s ongoing narrative about the shady dealings behind his wife, Gretchen’s, ‘theft of the 4th Congressional District of Massachusetts.’
The trouble was, that had back-fired too.
The pretty, very articulate, twenty-nine-year-old feisty mother of two had used the attacks to get free air time on radio and TV in the last fortnight and somehow, incredibly - given she was Claude Betancourt’s favourite little girl - managed to come across as an all-American housewife just trying to do the best thing for her country, her kids and her husband.
Apple pie might not have melted in her mouth!
The President threw an angry look at the White House Chief of Staff.
Forty-one-year-old Harry Robbins ‘Bob’ Haldeman was barely recognisable as the brash, arrogant former UCLA graduate and J. Walter Thompson executive, who had swept into the White House on Richard Nixon’s coat tails a little over three years ago. There were grey flecks in his flat crew cut hair, an ashen quality in his complexion and much of the energy and resilience which had carried him through the crises of 1965 and 1966, had been exhausted, much in the fashion of a compulsive gambler’s credit-worthiness.
But for Nixon’s aggressive assertion of executive privilege, Haldeman would have been hounded out of the White House last autumn with his old UCLA buddy John Ehrlichmann, and so many others. Ron Ziegler, the former White House Press secretary – who had been with the President in the 1964 election – the first of the ‘originals’ thrown to the wolves, was in jail, as were ‘the Warwick Hotel Plumbers’, the others sucked inexorably into the courts were mostly accused, like Ehrlichmann, and Haldeman, of obstruction of justice with ruthless prosecutors waiting to see which of the men closest to the President tried to cut a deal first.
The cover up had been a bigger problem than the crime right from the outset of the Warwick Hotel Scandal. The whole thing had been a routine FBI stunt, the sort of bugging exercise that LBJ and JFK had routinely authorised, or turned a blind eye to in earlier years, consistent with the objectives of the first phases of the Eisenhower sponsored incarnation of Operation Chaos.
For those around the President the calculus was writ plain.
The Campaign to Re-elect the President had become their mutual keep out of jail - a little longer - card.
“We need to dig up more dirt on Brenckmann. His kids, too. About his boy in the Navy, talk to the Pentagon again about setting up a new security inquiry…”
Bob Haldeman sighed.
“Melvin won’t do that, sir,” he said wearily.
And besides, having played that game once – bringing Walter Brenckmann junior back from the British Isles and trying to torpedo his career – the Chief of Naval Operations, Tom Moorer had made it clear he would tolerate no further ‘politicking in MY Navy!’
Moreover, Secretary of Defense, Melvin Robert ‘Bom’ Laird, the forty-five-year-old Nebraskan-born former Wisconsin Congressman who had inherited the Pentagon just before the war in the Midwest, who had had no part in any of the cover-ups, and been horrified to discover the ‘bizarre goings on at the White House’ had backed up the CNO.
When Haldeman had tried to bring him into line, Laird had abruptly retorted: ‘This is your problem, not mine. I serve at the President’s pleasure: you can tell your boss to get out of my face and let me get on with my job, or fire me!’
In another conversation, Laird had compared the Administration with ‘a badly-run organised crime family.’
In fact, Laird was the one publicly acknowledged straight arrow in the upper echelons of the Cabinet. Which, of course, from the perspective of the White House meant that he was, like Henry Kissinger, who had made his escape over a year ago, a potential ticking time bomb.
Men of Honour looking on from outside the cockpit of White House politics was the last thing anybody in the Oval Office needed right now!
Among his other troubles, Haldeman was increasingly worried about the President’s mental and physical wellbeing. There were worsening dark bags under his eyes and lately, meetings with him frequently degenerated into ranting monologues. And there was always somebody farther down the pecking order in the White House ready to spill new revelations to the press.
“Melvin needs to get those fucking Admirals moving in the Western Pacific,” the Commander-in-Chief said suddenly.
“Sir?”
“Last I heard, the Enterprise was still at Pearl Harbour?”