Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  “37th Air Army! It’s insane but somebody at HQ wants to make a fucking point. We’re not the only unit which has been ordered to prep for long-range operations over the Northern Pacific and the Arctic. There are going to be forty or fifty aircraft in the air tonight!”

  “Okay…”

  This is a joke, isn’t it?

  “We need you,” Olga reminded him tartly, “you, or one of your sub-Political Officers over here five minutes ago. You need to get your head in gear, Andrei! We all thought this was crazy when we got the orders. It is, obviously but it isn’t, if you see what I mean. This isn’t a local exercise; we’ve got Colonel Ignatov’s goons all over us and we can’t touch the Amerikanskaya Mechta until you’ve signed off the ground protocols to release the Kh-20.”

  Andrei Kirov was bewildered.

  What the fuck was going on?

  “Do we even know if the bloody thing is pre-armed, pre-programmed?”

  “No,” Olga retorted. “If it is, we’re screwed. But we always knew that. If you don’t get your arse over here we’ll be screwed now, not later!”

  Okay, that he could get his head around!

  This was nothing to do with 37th Air Army or KGB Central back in Vladivostok uncovering the conspiracy. No, this was more God trying to prove to them all that he a particularly eccentric sense of humour…

  Even so, could some big exercise, or show of force really be the reason Ignatov and his people had suddenly descended on Seryshevo? Just to supervise the first Sverdlovsk, or Vladivostok-approved exercise, more likely propaganda demonstration, with live nuclear weapons carried out in years?

  Possibly, as some sort of reaction to the election in the United States?

  “I’m coming over now,” he said abruptly, and put down the phone.

  He yelled for his deputy to report to him.

  The other man was as astonished as Kirov when he told him what was going on.

  “We’ve only got one deployable special munition,” Andrei concluded. “So, I’ll be on board the Amerikanskaya Mechta,” he paused, grinned, “our very own American Dreamer,” for the duration of this exercise. You’ll have to hold the fort here until I get back.”

  Then he was on his way down the stairs, shouting for his driver. The asylum had been stormed by the inmates.

  All these months Kirov had been playing a deadly game with Vladimir Zakharov; now it was as if events had intervened, and re-written the rules of engagement. Not that it changed much, the odds were that he and Olga, and the others still ended up dead sometime in the next few hours. However, right now even that thought was strangely reassuring.

  Colonel Yuri Ignatov caught up with Andrei Kirov about half-an-hour later. The man the 37th Air Army had sent to Seryshevo to ensure that the 182nd Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment pulled its weight in the coming exercise, was a distant relation of a former Khrushchev stalwart who had sat in the Politburo in October 1962, and briefly, in 1959 been Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

  Ignatov’s hard, dark eyes framed in a grey, humourless face might have intimidated Andrei had the newcomer not stood at least a dozen centimetres short of the giant KGB man.

  “Comrade General Zakharov does not trust you, Kirov,” he declared. “According to him you are a disgrace to your uniform.”

  Okay, it was good to know where one was with a stranger.

  I respect and admire Comrade General Zakharov, too.

  Andrei had sat in on the first, short session of the crew briefing. He only needed to be familiar with the big picture, not the technical mumbo jumbo that mostly sailed over his head.

  Operatsiya Osenniy Briz.

  Operation Autumn Breeze…

  Take off, fly north, then east, over the Sea of Okhotsk, across Kamchatka to a point approximately a thousand kilometres south-east of Soviet Petropavlovsk and about seven hundred south-west of Attu, on the Aleutian Archipelago.

  The object of the outward flight was to register the presence of the Amerikanskaya Mechta on US airborne and ‘spy ship’ radars, and thereafter, to fly a reconnaissance pattern up to another thousand kilometres to the east and the south, gathering electronic – ELINT as the Yankees called it – intelligence over the following twelve hours, prior to returning to Seryshevo via an overflight of the southernmost of the Kuril Islands, ‘tripping the American early warning radars on Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese home island, before running for home across Sakhalin. The mission was timed to last a little over eighteen hours. This apparently, was pushing the bomber and its crew to the limit; and at take-off the Amerikanskaya Mechta would be at, or marginally above, its maximum permitted weight of one-hundred-and-eighty-eight metric tons.

  ‘Be prepared for a very, very long take-off run,’ Dmitry Akimov had warned the others, smiling resignedly.

  Andrei Kirov took a moment to get his brain in gear before he replied to Colonel Ignatov’s remarks about his fitness to wear the uniform he had worn for the last decade.

  “Had you been privileged to read any of the reports I have submitted about General Zakharov’s political integrity, customary conduct and the lax way in which he conducts his duties,” he retorted, feigning irritation as if he was in too much of a hurry to be bothered with this shit now, “you would have inferred that my professional assessment of the man is not dissimilar to his of me, Comrade Colonel!”

  “Zakharov still has powerful friends,” Ignatov sniffed dismissively. “You do not.”

  “That’s because I’ve been too busy fighting in the Motherland’s wars of the present era, not the ones of twenty-five years’ ago,” Andrei Kirov rasped, with an appearance of an impending, gathering outrage that he did not feel. “Some of us have been at the front most of the last six years; not hiding in fucking bunkers or resting their fat arses in comfortable billets miles from where the action is!”

  The other officer was perhaps, half-a-dozen years the KGB man’s senior but looked like a man deep into middle age. Radiation sickness often did that. Although people seemed to recover; often it was illusory. The damage was done, for a while it remained beneath the skin, that was all. If he had not known that before, he had learned that from Olga. She knew her time was short; that life was for the living and that the future would have to look after itself.

  Was that how it was for Ignatov?

  “Zakharov is worried about the loyalty of certain flying personnel,” the other man confided, his tone less hostile but no friendlier. “Further to this, he questions your accounting of the Osipov incident?”

  “Yeah, well, he wasn’t there,” Andrei growled. “Weapons Specialists Petrovna and Zhukov were. That fucker Osipov was trying to launch the aircraft’s Kh-20.”

  “Either of the women had the right to shoot him; yet you were the only person in the compartment to draw your gun?”

  “They were too busy trying to keep him away from the controls!”

  Ignatov nodded. The two men had fallen into step as the big man exited the briefing room. Now, they paused as they emerged from the Operations Centre Bunker into the cool late autumn afternoon. A chill wind skittered the length of the main runway.

  Winter was coming.

  “Besides,” Andrei relented. “They were terrified of shooting a hole in the aircraft. They had a better idea what was going to happen if the compartment explosively decompressed than I had,” he added, trying to lighten his tone. “Actually, I’d had had my eye on Lieutenant Osipov for some weeks. He had been behaving erratically. In the old days, he would have been grounded and put under psychiatric surveillance.” He shrugged. “But I don’t have to tell you that 37th Air Army has been running down Seryshevo as a bomber base for the last fifteen months.”

  Ignatov scowled.

  “HQ has been reconfiguring its force structures and infrastructure in the last year,” he countered, “consistent with guidance received from the Red Air Force Supreme Directorate in Sverdlovsk. It was necessary to make gestures, signals of our good intent, to progress the p
eace process with the Americans. Seryshevo will again become a major part of the air defence system of the Soviet Union in the coming year.”

  The two men had halted, each as unsure of what to say next as the other.

  “Comrade Major General Zakharov has been placed under arrest,” Ignatov said matter-of-factly. “My men have escorted him to his dacha pending his transfer to Komsomolsk-on-Amur, for his trial.”

  Andrei Kirov stared at him in blank incomprehension.

  “My superiors have instructed me to convey their sincerest thanks to you, and to the KGB apparat in Vladivostok, for the information and assistance rendered to my department and 37th Air Army in this sad affair. Unfortunately, when a base as significant as Seryshevo is reconfigured, there is invariably, great scope for corrupt dealings; the sale of Red Air Force stores, fuel, and even surplus weaponry, not to mention for false accounting and the taking of bribes or other inducements, to favour particular, disreputable contractors and bad actors within the service and the Party throughout the whole Military District. Thus far, we have only scratched the surface of Zakharov’s heinous activities. Had it not been for your courageous stand against the man’s foul administration – and I suspect, from the substance of your reports, the assistance of several Red Air Force officers, in which connection Weapons Specialist Olga Yurievna will, in due course, receive a commendation and a promotion – Zakharov would have been free to continue his revisionist, traitorous career in, possibly, an even more senior post.”

  Inwardly, the big man was now a mush of emotions, relief, incredulity; and desperately trying not to laugh like a horse.

  This was ridiculous, a true farce.

  “One must always remember that one has a higher duty,” he muttered, seemingly embarrassed. “To the Party, and to one’s comrades…”

  “We shall talk again when you return from Operation Autumn Breeze,” Ignatov said, his face twitching into what might have been a smile.

  Then, to Andrei’s astonishment, the smaller man stuck out his hand to shake his.

  Chapter 74

  Monday 4th November, 1968

  Michigan Central, Detroit

  The great railway terminus had once been the jewel of Corktown, the gateway to the automobile manufacturing capital of the planet, the Midwest and the industrial cities of the Great Lakes, and not least, via a tunnel beneath the Detroit River, to the Canadian side of the border.

  Those glory days had been fading fast by the night of the October War, and in the years since people had bled out of the area as the factories, one by one, had been abandoned. The War in the Midwest had halted but not turned back the decline, military contracts had been like a shot in the arm to the Big Three automobile companies; however, that stimulus had already run its course, and now Ford, General Motors and Chrysler were pulling in their horns again and as everywhere, inevitably it was the coloureds and the Latinos, anybody who was ‘other’ who were the first to be laid off. People told Walter Brenckmann that coming to the ‘Motor City’ was a mistake, the ‘lid was about to blow’ and he did not want to be anywhere near it when the Army was called in to re-take the streets.

  Historically, outsiders tended to take talk of things getting out of hand with a pinch of salt. Not so anybody who knew the city; people still remembered the race riots of 1943 – when several thousand troops had had to put down three days of rioting in which over thirty people were killed, and some four hundred injured - and a quarter-of-a-century later still lived with the simmering tensions constantly inflamed by crushing poverty and injustice. Very little had changed since the 1940s, Detroit was a white city run by the sweat of blacks, where all the shots were called by the men who ran the big automotive plants and got fat on lucrative military contracts, while the kids of their former workers went hungry in the mean streets around the derelict factories.

  That many of the districts of downtown Detroit were already half-abandoned, and the people left there forgotten, bitter that predominantly prosperous white blue-collar workers had left the city, moving out to the leafier suburbs, or migrating to the newer engineering and manufacturing plants outside the old city limits, even though it was not a trend particular to Michigan. The city had been a boom town for most of the first half of the century, the home to the Model T, and when the Second War and its economic afterglow had kept Detroit working in the 1950s, everybody had complacently assumed the good times would never end.

  The good times had ended, of course.

  Michigan Central had been a weather vane of the decline: first passengers had switched to the roads, with their new wealth they had bought their own cars, or ridden Greyhounds out of town, out of County, anywhere but Detroit. During the fifties the Big Three had begun to contract, rationalise their operations. By the time of the October War fewer trains were running, people no longer travelled long-distance by rail, and one by one the fourteen lines into Michigan Central had shut, as had the café, the shops and most of the ticket booths in the concourse of the great beaux art station with its skyline dominating fourteen-storey tower.

  Opened in 1914, the terminus was but a pale shell of its mid-century glory these days. It had been over a decade since its concourse was packed, and now there was a huge crowd milling outside across the acres of waste ground which had once been Michigan Central’s coach and marshalling yard.

  The Brenckmanns could glimpse the splendour that had once been, through the layers of dilapidation and the boarded up doors and windows. Nothing could detract from the massive window which filled one end of the space with grey, washed out light on that rainy day.

  The Mayor of Detroit and the Great Lakes State’s Governor, George Romney headed the reception committee.

  Mayor Jerome Cavanagh had only been thirty-three when he was elected in 1962. Like mayors across America, he had attempted to defend his city, and his people from the worst consequences of the October War. He looked fifty, not forty, and his smile that of a man who still really did not believe that the next President of the United States had chosen his city, to host his last day on the campaign trail. Cavanagh was a canny operator on the centre left of the Democrat spectrum, whose early initiatives had included appointing a reforming chief of police and extending a hand of friendship to Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. He had briefly been mentioned as a possible contender for the Democrat ticket in 1968. But there had been too many JFK democrats in the mix, Bobby for starters, and George McGovern, all with a head-start on him and he had concentrated on his day job in Detroit, at the time a seemingly isolated Democrat pocket in a state Richard Nixon had been anticipated to take in the General Election.

  It said everything about the American political system and the chaos which had characterised the race for the White House, that the Brenckmann’s should be welcomed to a northern city more riven by racial strife than practically any in the lower South, by a one-time hope of the Democratic left, and the newly appointed Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and that both men’s welcome was heartfelt.

  With one eye on the weather, plans had been made to shift Walter Brenckmann’s key-note arrival speech into the concourse.

  “Unless it is raining very hard,” he decided, “I will speak to the people waiting outside.”

  The train had had to halt, twice, short of the terminus because despite the despairing efforts of the Detroit PD, there were so many people spilling across the lines. Thankfully the worst of the rain had eased, although there was still a film of drizzle in the air.

  Joanne Brenckmann gasped as the couple emerged into the dull daylight. The crowd seemed to stretch to the horizon, people were literally hanging off lamp posts, young children where balancing on their parents’ shoulders. Yet there was no surging, no swaying in the throng; people were just waiting.

  The appearance of the Brenckmann’s stirred a swelling murmuring whisper that ran back from the low stage into the middle distance where grimy tenements had risen beyond the boundaries of the old coach park.

/>   Walter Brenckmann glanced to his wife.

  She smiled strength.

  He tapped one of the microphones in front of him. He guessed that there had to be at least a dozen, each labelled CBS, or NBC, or ABC, and so forth.

  He had got better at public speaking in the last few years.

  Addressing men on the stern of a warship had always come easily; but talking to Navy men was not the same thing as standing on a political platform and there were things one might customarily say to other men, that one would not dream of voicing in mixed company.

  “Well!” He grimaced, looking around. “Isn’t this a thing!”

  It helped to have Ted Sorenson feeding him verbal flourishes, and intellectual garnishes, standing ready to put structure to what otherwise would have been disconnected, or at best, clumsily joined ideas. That was not to say that his words were not his own; Walter Brenckmann believed that if he was not true to himself, then he was nothing.

  “When Jo and I thought we’d take a little train ride to the Great Lakes, we never expected a welcome like this!”

  The crowd was coming alive.

  Shouts, incoherent erupted from left of stage.

  Joanne Brenckmann half-turned, beaming broadly, and waved and suddenly thousands of arms were waving back.

  Her husband gathered himself again, struck by how many black faces there were in front of him and as was often the case, he was profoundly humbled to be the object of so much attention, and hope…

  “We came here today because we wanted you to know that you have not been forgotten and that while I am President, you will never be forgotten!”

  He did not wait for the initial swell of agreement, or clapping to deafen him.

  “I swear to you, all of you that my Administration will be colour-blind. All Americans are born equal and are equal before the law; and all Americans ought to get the same breaks from their government. I will work with any Democrat,” another gesture, this time by his left hand towards George Romney, “and any Republican who puts the unity of the people before party, race or creed. Doctor Martin Luther King will be as welcome in my White House as an Italian-American or Latino-American, or Japanese-American, or any Ivy-League white man or woman. We are all in this together and I give you my word that my door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, will always be open for your Mayor, and your Governor!”