by James Philip
Chapter 62
Monday 14th October, 1968
Amerikanskaya Mechta, 90 kilometres west of Kamchatka
It was an aerodynamic oddity that the big bomber flew better, and was safer to land with the fuel tanks of the Raduga Rh-20 carried under its belly, two-thirds full rather than empty. It was something to do with the Tu-95’s centre of gravity and the weight distribution of the flying bomb’s three-megaton hydrogen bomb and of her Lyulka AL-7 turbojet – in the absence of a fuel load – which made, according to Dmitry Akimov, the aircraft ‘fly like a brick shithouse in a storm’; so, after that first landing that none of them thought they were going to survive, the missile had been partially fuelled for subsequent ‘training’ flights.
Not that anybody was overly enthusiastic about it the new regime of ‘training’ flights. Nobody was unhappier than the bomber’s first pilot, Dmitry Akimov, or Olga Petrovna or Andrei Kirov; because they understood that the next time that they took off they might discover they were flying with a live, pre-armed thermonuclear bomb already set to detonate at a given hour, or altitude.
Major General Vladimir Zakharov could pull the trigger whenever he wanted because he had had the Kh-20’s three-megaton warhead configured by his people in Special Weapons Store Number One.
What was even more worrying to the trio had been the reaction to the news that henceforth the bomber would be carrying a ‘strategic payload’ on what amounted, to operations analogous to the US Air Force’s failsafe missions, of Olga’s deputy, Junior Lieutenant Karl Osipov, who despite having practically ‘gone missing’ when the bomber was grounded in July, was, technically, responsible for the preparation, loading, systems configuration, launch and targeting of the Kh-20, or any other weapons systems carried on the aircraft, albeit under Olga’s direct supervision.
Twenty-five-year-old Osipov retained his rebellious mop of black hair, and boyish insouciance but lately he was often drunk, worse for wear during the day and increasingly uncommunicative. Olga had speculated that this might simply be because Tatyana Zhukov had finally given him the brush off, not that they had ever really been a couple. Now the pair of them ignored each other, and Osipov had several times attempted to pass orders to the other woman via Olga. If that was not ridiculous – which it was – a couple of nights ago, Osipov had got blind drunk in the Mess and announced that the next time the Amerikanskaya Mechta flew ‘we ought to fly the fucking thing all the way to Tokyo and wipe out all those slit-eyed Yankee collaborators!’
Karl Osipov had never been brought in on the conspiracy but it was obvious that somehow, he had either figured it out, or been tipped off. As to who might have inducted him into the plot, well, that could hardly be a mystery.
Comrade General Zakharov liked to play his games…
‘Are we going to do it this time?” He had asked Dmitry Akimov at the crew briefing in the dark before the dawn that morning, much to the confusion of the base’s Intelligence Officer and Meteorologist.
‘Lay off the jokes, Karl,’ Olga had hissed. ‘Just because this is a training flight, there’s no need to piss around!’
‘Have it your way, Comrade Weapons Specialist,’ the man had shrugged sulkily.
It was not that the others did not recognise the symptoms. Once one allowed the reality of the obliteration of large tracts of the Motherland and the eradication of much of one’s family back in 1962, and the dislocation and the humiliations of the last six years to burrow, weevil-like into one’s head melancholy, disillusion and despair was a normal response to a catastrophe that otherwise, defeated all human comprehension.
Karl Osipov had just been a big kid at the time of the Cuban Missiles War, now he was exiled in the Far East at a rundown base. What residual honour there might once have been flying in the Red Air Force had been progressively undermined in his time in the service. And now Tatyana had rejected him. He had no real friends at Seryshevo; the ideology, the belief-system he had grown up with was bankrupt, transparently sold out by the big men at Sverdlovsk. So, that left him rootless, homesick for a home in Kiev which had ceased to exist – like most of his extended family – six years ago. He was lost in the world, angry, and now he had discovered that the small handful of people he had thought were his brothers in arms, had been lying to him all this time.
Had they not been so worried about Karl Osipov; they might have obsessed over the sudden overnight illness which had seen Weapons Technician Konstantin Konovalev admitted to the base hospital. He had been found on the barracks floor, feverish and incoherent in a puddle of his own vomit, urine and faeces.
The hospital had reported to Dmitry Akimov that Konovalev was stable but very unwell, having not yet regained consciousness.
And no, they had no idea whatsoever was wrong with him other than that he might have had a seizure, or epileptic fit of some kind.
On a long mission Olga and Tatyana would take the first watch – usually six to eight hours – and rest while Osipov and Konovalev took over. Although the latter’s absence was not going to be a problem on this exercise, scheduled to last approximately nine hours; Akimov, Olga and the KGB man knew that they had to deal with Karl Osipov before he inadvertently, or deliberately, betrayed them all.
It had not been a hard thing to decide.
They had no idea why Vladimir Zakharov had let Osipov in on their dirty little secret; it did not matter. The Base Commandant was a scheming bastard, for all they knew he had never been serious about Operation Judgement Day; perhaps, this was just some kind of twisted test.
Who was still on board with the conspiracy; who was getting cold feet?
Andrei Kirov had been the one who had known what had to be done. After he had said it, the others had understood. The logic of their situation was ineluctable.
Dmitry Akimov called Olga on the secure circuit.
“If we’re going to do this, now is the best time.”
She acknowledged tersely and glanced to Andrei Kirov.
The big man had been trying to make it look as if he was dozing for the last thirty minutes. He had pulled his voluminous KGB uniform greatcoat over his pressure suit; it was all right for the others, they had something to do during a flight, he was just a passenger allocated a duty station nowhere near a hot-air vent.
He reached unhurriedly into the folds of his coat.
A moment later Karl Osipov was blinking down the barrel of the KGB man’s 9-millimetre Markova pistol. The gun looked like a toy in the giant’s right paw.
In the last hour the aircraft had descended from ten thousand to just two thousand metres, enabling the crew to discard their oxygen masks.
“This is going to end one of two ways,” Andrei explained, matter-of-factly.
The only other person in the compartment was Tatyana Zhukov, whom Olga had told everything – well, everything that she had not already guessed or feared – before they learned about Konstantin Konovalev having been rushed to the hospital.
‘Until I worked out what was going on, I was afraid you had all gone insane,’ Tatyana had responded, before she reflected on the bad news, that they were damned both ways. ‘But it was General Zakharov all the time…’
Andrei Kirov had known things were spiralling out of control weeks ago. Initially, it had been safer to let it happen than to try to intervene. He and the conspirators were trapped, there was nothing to be done except go along with the suicide mission; hoping that somewhere along the way they thought of something better. Sooner or later, the news that he was flying as the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s Political Officer rather than overseeing his duties on the ground would get back to Vladivostok. If he was lucky the idiots would decide he was just been over-zealous after the bollocking he got the last time he was summoned to Vladivostok by Far East First Secretary of the KGB Kryuchkov. If not, what could the bastards do to him that they were not going to do anyway?
Karl Osipov stared down the barrel of the Markova.
“You will tell me what I want to know or I will bl
ow your brains out,” Andrei promised the Red Air Force man. He thought about it. “After I shoot you through the elbows and the knees, that is, if you piss me about. If you play nice, we can all be civilised about this.”
Karl Osipov threw an imploring look at Olga. She bounced it straight back in his face. Tatyana looked away, as Andrei had advised her to do ‘when the funs starts.’
“You won’t fire that thing, not while we’re in the air. You could blow up the whole aircraft,” Karl Osipov objected, projecting a bravura he obviously did not feel.
The big man ignored this.
He waited.
Olga did not think discharging a firearm in the air was a very good idea either, any more than he did but if he blew up the bomber, he blew it up; they were running out of options.
If he blew up the aircraft today, that was too bad.
They were screwed, living on borrowed time anyway; this way they just went out a few days early, that was all.
“Zakharov suspects you won’t go through with it!” The other man blurted. “He knows that I will!”
“He told you that?” Andrei demanded.
The other man nodded, suddenly less afraid, almost cocky.
The KGB man thought about shooting him in the left knee.
No, he’d thrash about, there would be a lot of blood and it was not as if it was going to be practical to manhandle a still bleeding body to the nearest exit hatch. Whatever happened, they were going to have to take the cadaver back to Seryshevo; and the medical people would examine it…
Besides, they had not quite got to that stage of the proceedings; this might still end without lethal violence.
“Yes, Comrade General Zakharov told me that…”
“When?”
“About ten days ago.”
“Why did he tell you?”
“Because…” That was the moment the condemned man realised it was over. They did not care when he had betrayed them, that was unimportant. It was the fact of that betrayal which had sealed his fate.
“Who else did he tell you?” Andrei asked.
“I don’t know.”
Olga exchanged a single, resigned look with the KGB man and pointed at Tatyana.
The other woman touched the intercom stud at her throat.
She screamed.
“Karl has gone crazy! He’s trying to launch the Raduga…”
That was when Andrei Kirov shot Karl Osipov in the chest.
Four times, just to be sure.
Chapter 63
Tuesday 15th October, 1968
Ground Zero, 20 West 34th Street, Manhattan
Everybody who came to New York visited the ruined shrine to the fallen of New Year’s Eve 1965; the blackened, cracked eight-storey high, crumbling stump of the Empire State Building.
Everything for hundreds of yards around it had been demolished, or excavated down to foundations up to sixty or seventy feet beneath street level. Farther out, the gleaming blocks and towers of the Rockefeller Centre stood defiant, wholly repaired, restored now like beacons of the rebirth of Manhattan. The old United Nations building had been made safe, otherwise mothballed, as had many of the other skyscrapers, like the abandoned Chrysler Building, grim sentinels overlooking the East River where the traffic which had previously snarled up the whole of Midtown, now raced, unfettered through the Death Zone. Times Square, perhaps the scene of the worst, most horrific suffering as the thronging crowds were decimated by the hundreds of tons of razor glass that rained down upon them, was now the site of memorials where daily, hundreds of New Yorkers brought fresh flowers, and knelt, or stood, praying and remembering the lost.
The two couples were as anonymous in the queues of people waiting to pay their respects, to pause awhile in memory of the fallen, as they could ever be in this city. The men in their dark blue uniforms, their wives dressed in funeral black, one with a babe in arms, the other with two toddlers, one clinging to her mother’s hand, the other, carried in his father’s arms. For once, the young ones were struck dumb, as if enchanted by the solemn spell of the places they were visiting, and the presence of so many thousands of ghosts.
Tuesday was the quietest day, usually.
But it happened that it was a dry, sunny autumn day and many New Yorkers had taken the opportunity to pay an unplanned homage; so, the death zone and its memorials were unquiet, and the Manhattan PD had had to hurriedly draft in new squads to man the barriers keeping the visitors away from those areas still under survey, or known to be unsafe. So many huge buildings had collapsed that the service tunnels, sewers, and parts of the subway system had been blocked, or wrecked by the resulting shaking of so many earthquake-like falls. Here and there the ground had subsided, elsewhere sink holes periodically opened without warning, hence the clearly marked ‘safe’ routes, and city ordinances posted on billboards and walls threatening arrest for anybody so foolish as to stray off the clearly delineated ‘surveyed areas’.
Of course, kids and intrepid adults, went exploring all the time although, not so much now as in the first year after the cataclysm. The authorities had said looters would be shot on sight, and curfews had been instituted; but there had been such an outcry when a pair of teenage college boys had been shot dead by National Guardsman, that the shoot on sight policy had been quietly dropped. There had never been much left to be looted in the first place, not by kids or lone prospectors with a pick and shovel. All the serious recovery work, and mining of the vaults of banks, businesses and private apartment blocks had been carried out by the Corps of Engineers, or by Army or Navy Salvage units, operating off ships and barges moored on the Hudson or the East River.
Even here, within the great circle of cleared ground, framed by and largely surrounded by repaired and derelict, deserted monolithic steel and concrete guardian towers delineating the killing ground from the surviving canyon-like streets beyond, the waste ground was greening.
Across the Northern Hemisphere all the bomb sites were greening: from London to Moscow, from Berlin to the Urals and distant Mongolia, Paris and the ravaged cities of the Low Countries, across the Atlantic to the death zones of Seattle, Chicago and even the desert wilderness which had once been Las Vegas, by the autumn each year the greening had crept into, over and through the ruins, mother nature reclaiming its own.
Here in Midtown the pavements sprouted weeds, the churned, bulldozer- and wrecking ball-reclaimed land was grassy, here and there windblown seeds had found root, and knee-high saplings reached for the distant sky. They said ‘city foxes’ roamed the death zone by night, that the rats had re-colonised the underworld beneath the streets and birds long exiled from the city now nested in lofty eyries atop the abandoned skyscrapers overlooking the circle of death.
Only the distant – like thunder the other side of faraway hills – rumbling of traffic disturbed the tranquility of the open ground on what had been the corner of West 33rd Street and 5th Avenue, where the couples and their children paused to bow their heads.
By then the two couples and their bambinos had spent over two hours on hallowed ground, the little ones were getting restive and, and Lady Marija Christopher was aware that her friends were getting anxious about her.
This was ridiculous: she could put up with her bones aching a little, paying respects to the dead of this place was more important than that! And as for her advancing pregnancy; well, that was one of the many blessings that a merciful God had bestowed upon her and her growing family, not any kind of problem or illness!
She and Mary Griffin raised their veils as the small party, and their obligatory accompanying Royal Marines – in mufti, today but still every inch warriors – of their four-man protection detachment made their way back to the zone’s perimeter to their cars for the trip back across the Brooklyn Bridge, the men to the Dockyard, and the women and children to their temporary shared Long Island residence. Inevitably, even here on what remained, to most Americans, sacred ground, there were the normal photographers. Although, nowhere near as ma
ny as usually stalked them.
Neither woman had made any attempt to dab away the tears; their husbands were grim-faced as they bade their farewells, and dropped into the back of their US Navy car.
Only one of the bodyguards was coming with them to the docks but both he, and the US Navy Shore Patrol man at the wheel of the car, were packing forty-fives.
Bizarrely, other than when he was out and about with Marija or the kids, Peter Christopher never gave a second thought to his personal security, and he knew Jack Griffin was the same. He used to think it was something to do with his time on Talavera – their shared time, that was – when they could, and by rights ought both have been killed four or five times: the ship might have been berthed at Chatham when the port was destroyed on the night of the October War; they might have drowned when the ship was bombed off Cape Finisterre in that storm; or perished in that, in retrospect, insane shooting gallery melee off Lampedusa; or when that stray nuke aimed at Malta had vaporised Talavera’s sister ship, the Aisne and they had gone under the stern of the Big E to fight her fires; and neither of them ought to have survived Talavera’s last battle. But that could not be it; they both had so much to live for, more even than they had had that afternoon off Dragut Point, Sliema in April 1964.
Nevertheless, both men were subdued, not in the mood for the normal small talk, banter they tended to exchange in private. Perhaps, today, that had something to do with the presence of the two men in the front seat, even though the Marine was one of the men who had been with them the first time they had been in America.
“It’s Corporal Simms, isn’t it?” Peter inquired.
The man half-turned, would have saluted had he not been in the car and ever-mindful of the need to keep his saluting hand close to his personal weapon.
“Yes, sir!”
“Congratulations on your second stripe. You must be well on the way to your third by now?”
“I’m happy as I am, sir! Thank you, sir! I’m looking forward to joining Liverpool, sir!”