“Sentimental bastard,” Pipes growled.
In front of the office television an hour later, Toland missed having Chuck Lowe around to back up his translation. The Chairman had an annoying tendency to speak rapidly, and Toland’s Russian was barely up to it. The speech took forty minutes, three-quarters of which was standard political phraseology. At the end, however, the Chairman announced mobilization of Category-B reserve units to meet the potential German threat.
12 – Funeral Arrangements
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
The House of Unions was unusually crowded, Toland saw. Ordinarily they only buried one hero at a time with such ceremony. Once there had been three dead cosmonauts, but now there were eleven heroes. Eight Young Octobrists from Pskov, three boys and five girls ranging in age from eight to ten, and three clerical employees, all men who worked directly for the Politburo, were laid out in polished birchwood coffins, surrounded by a sea of flowers. Toland examined the screen closely. The caskets were elevated so that the victims were visible, but two of the faces were covered with black silk, a framed photograph atop the coffins to show what the children had looked like in life. It was a piteous, horrible touch for the television cameras to linger on.
The Hall of Columns was draped in red and black, with even the ornate chandeliers masked for this solemn occasion. The families of the victims stood in an even line. Parents without their children, wives and children without fathers. They were dressed in the baggy, ill-cut clothes so characteristic of the Soviet Union. Their faces showed no emotion but shock, as if they were still trying to come to terms with the damage done to their lives, still hoping that they’d awake from this ghastly nightmare to find their loved ones safe in their own beds. And knowing that this would not be.
The Chairman of the Party came somberly down the line, embracing each of the bereaved, a black mourning band on his sleeve to contrast with the gaudy Order of Lenin emblem on his lapel. Toland looked closely at his face. There was real emotion there. One could almost imagine that he was burying members of his own family.
One of the mothers accepted the embrace, then the kiss, and nearly collapsed, falling to her knees and burying her face in her hands. The Chairman dropped down to her side even before her husband did, and pulled her head into his shoulder. A moment later he helped her back to her feet, moving her gently toward the protective arm of her husband, a captain in the Soviet Army whose face was a stone mask of rage.
God almighty, Toland thought. They couldn’t have staged that any better with Eisenstein himself directing.
MOSCOW, R.S.F.S.R.
You cold-hearted bastard, Sergetov said to himself. He and the rest of the Politburo stood in another line to the left of the caskets. He kept his face pointed forward, toward the line of coffins, but he averted his eyes, only to see four television cameras recording the ceremony. The whole world was watching them, the TV people had assured them. So exquisitely organized it was. Here was the penultimate act of the maskirovka The honor guard of Red Army soldiers mixed with boys and girls of the Moscow Young Pioneers to watch over the murdered children. The lilting violins. Such a masquerade! Sergetov told himself. See how kind we are to the families of those we have murdered! He had seen many lies in his thirty-five years in the Party. He had told enough of them himself but never anything that came close to this. Just as well, he thought, that I’ve had nothing to eat today.
His eyes came back reluctantly to the waxen face of a child. He remembered the sleeping faces of his own children, now grown. So often after arriving home late from Party work, he had stolen a look into their bedroom at night to see their peaceful faces, always lingering to be sure that they were breathing normally, listening for the sniffles of a cold or the murmurs of a dream. How often had he told himself that he and the Party worked for their future? No more colds, little one, he said with his eyes to the nearest child. No more dreams. See what the Party has done for your future. His own eyes filled with tears-and he hated himself for it. His Comrades would think it part of the performance. He wanted to look around, to see what his Comrades of the Politburo thought of their handiwork. He wondered what the KGB team that had done the deed thought of their mission now. If they were still alive, he reflected. So easy to put them on an airplane and crash it into the ground so that not even executioners would know of them. All records of the bomb plot were already destroyed, he was sure, and of the thirty men who knew of it, more than half were right there, standing in line with him. Sergetov almost wished he had entered the building five minutes sooner. Better to be dead than to be a beneficiary of such infamy-but he knew better. In that case he would have played an even larger role in this brutal farce.
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
“Comrades. We see before us the innocent children of our nation,” the Chairman began, speaking with slow, quiet diction that made Toland’s translation job easier. CINCLANT’s intelligence chief was at his side. “Killed by the infernal engine of State terrorism. Killed by a nation that has twice defiled our Motherland with unholy dreams of conquest and murder. We see before us the dedicated, humble servants of our Party who asked nothing more than to serve the State. We see martyrs to the security of the Soviet Union. We see martyrs to the aggression of fascists.
“Comrades, to the families of these innocent children, and to the families of these three fine men, I say that a reckoning will come. I say that their deaths will not be forgotten. I say that there will be justice for this vicious crime . . .”
“Jesus.” Toland stopped translating and looked over at his senior.
“Yeah. There’s going to be a war. We have a linguistic team across the street doing a full translation, Bob. Let’s go see the boss.”
“You’re sure?” CINCLANT asked.
“It’s possible they will settle for something less, sir,” Toland replied. “But I don’t think so. Everything about this exercise has been run in such a way as to inflame the Russian population to a degree I’ve never seen before.”
“Let’s put this all the way on the table. You’re saying that they deliberately murdered these people to foment a crisis.” CINCLANT looked down at his desk. “It’s hard to believe, even for them.”
“Admiral, either we believe that or we believe that the West German government has decided to precipitate a war against the Soviet Union on their own hook. In the second case the Germans would have to be totally out of their fucking minds, sir,” Toland blurted, forgetting that only admirals swear in front of admirals.
“But why?”
We don’t know the why. That’s a problem with intelligence, sir. It’s a lot easier to tell the what than the why.”
CINCLANT stood and walked to the corner of his office. There was going to be a war, and he didn’t know why. He wanted the why. The why might be important.
“We’re starting to call up reserves. Toland, you have done one hell of a good job over the past two months. I’m going to request that you get bumped up a grade to full commander. You’re outside the normal zone, but I think I just might be able to handle it. There’s an open intel billet with Com Second Fleet staff. He’s put in a request for you if things go sour, and it looks like they are. You would be number three on his threat team, and you’d be out on a carrier. I want you out there.”
“It sure would be nice to have a day or two with the family, sir.”
The Admiral nodded. “We owe you that much. NIMITZ is in transit anyway. You can meet her off the Spanish coast. Report back here Wednesday morning with your bags packed.” CINCLANT came over to shake his hand. “Well done, Commander.”
Two miles away, PHARRIS was tied alongside her tender. As Ed Morris watched from the bridge, ASROC rocket-boosted torpedoes were being lowered onto his bow by crane, then fed into the magazine. Another crane was lowering supplies onto the helicopter hangar aft, and a third of his crew was hard at work moving them into proper storage spaces throughout the ship. He’d had the PHARRIS for nearly two years now, and this was the first time they’d had a full weapons loadout. The eight-cell “pepperbox” ASROC launcher was being serviced by shoreside technicians to correct a minor mechanical glitch. Another team from the tender was going over a radar problem with his own crew. This was the end of his own checklist of problems to be fixed. The ship’s engineering plant was functioning perfectly, better than he would have expected for a ship nearly twenty years old. In another few hours, USS PHARRIS would be completely ready . . . for what?