Interlude: Toy Plane (Part 2)
Marshal Ustinov arrived at the command bunker at 8:30 pm. He still hadn’t decided what to do with Gorbachev, or the Petrovs.
Waiting for him was Grigory Romanov, Russia's chief industrialist.
“Who let you in?” Ustinov asked as an aide helped him put his usual military coat back on.
“Oh don’t mind me,” said Romanov. “I’m just a real fan of military engagements. Plus you owe me.”
Ustinov rolled his eyes. “Stay out of the way, and keep your mouth shut,” he instructed. He turned to a nameless subordinate. “Give me a timeline,” he instructed, as he made his way deeper into the compound.
“The plane entered Pacific Soviet airspace ninety minutes ago,” the bespectacled little man answered. “It managed to cross Kamchatka before we could get any aircraft scrambled.”
Ustinov checked his notes. “We had a missile test scheduled to occur in Kamchatka today. Did they interfere with it?”
“No, but they were obviously spying on it.”
“Obviously,” chimed in Romanov, earning him a warning glare from Ustinov.
“It left Soviet airspace, but re-entered south of Sakhalin Island,” the aide explained as the group finally reached the control room. “We have three Su-15s and a MiG-23 on intercept.”
Ustinov strode to the front of the room and picked up a microphone. “This is Marshal Ustinov to Far East Air. Do you have positive identification?”
“This is Commander Kamensky to Marshal Ustinov. We have matters well in hand here. There is no need for your intervention at this time.”
Ustinov looked down at the table, where a report outlining all of the times Far East Air Command had failed to stop the multiple American incursions over the Kuriles were documented. “I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Commander. I repeat: do you have positive identification?”
“This is General Kornukov, speaking in support of my superior, Commander Kamensky. Target has already flown over Kamchatka and refused to identify itself or respond to our warning fire. Its course puts it on a direct path to bomb crucial air fields. Proactive retaliation is demanded under the circumstances!”
Ustinov reached into the pocket of his coat to hide a clenching fist, and was surprised to discover that both book and toy had been transferred from his civilian coat. He pulled the toy jet out and examined it in the dim light of the command center. “Well do me a favor and describe it, alright? Describe this plane so fast that your jets are only now able to catch up with it. Demonstrate that it’s obviously an American interceptor, and I’ll give you complete freedom to deal with it.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
“It has…blinking lights,” answered the reluctant voice of General Kornukov. “And two rows of windows.”
Ustinov dropped the toy plane to grip the microphone with both hands. “That is no jet, comrades, it’s a Boeing, a passenger plane that has wandered off course. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the pilot was unable to even recognize our warning fire. Under no circumstances are you to—”
“It’s slowing down!” exclaimed an anonymous tracker in the room.
“Target is climbing,” explained a new voice. “I’m overshooting it, but don’t worry, I think I know how to take it out.”
“Stand down! Stand down!” ordered Marshal Ustinov. “It’s a civilian plane.”
“A civilian plane that was probably altered into being a bomber,” suggested Romanov. “Better shoot it down to be sure.”
“You will stand down, that is a direct order!” insisted Ustinov. He then pointed at Romanov. “And get that civilian out of the room!”
“You’re making a grave mistake!” cried Romanov as a pair of military police grabbed him and started dragging him away. “I decide who the next Secretary-General will be, and it sure as hell won’t be some pansy who’s unable to stand up to American aggression! You’re finished, Marshal Ustinov. You hear me, finished!”
“I’ve got it locked on target, Sir,” pleaded the pilot. “Please, Sir. We’ve been humiliated so many times before. Please let me do something for the honor of the Soviet Union.”
“What’s your name, son?”
“Genadi. Major Genadi Osipovich. And I’m running out of time to make the shot.”
“Genadi,” Ustinov said gently. “As a pilot of the Soviet Air Force, you are trained on your observation skills. When you overflew the target, you were probably pretty close, yes?”
“Yes, I was less than 30 meters.”
“And when you flew over the windows of this possibly-converted bomber, what did you see inside?”
“I couldn’t see inside.”
“What about the tail insignia?”
“It…it was red. A sort of stylized bird in a red circle.”
“Korean Air Lines!” exclaimed the bespectacled aide.
Ustinov nodded. “Exactly, it’s the insignia of Korean Air Lines. Now the Americans are a great number of things, but they are not cowards. They would not hide behind an ally’s corporate logo when sneaking into this country to provoke a war. They would use American Airlines, or United, and any of the other brands based on American soil. What I am saying is that this is exactly what it appears to be, an unfortunate mistake by a civilian airliner. And we do not shoot down civilians. Is that understood?”
“U…understood, Sir,” said a clearly-shaken Genadi Osipovich.
“Now, why don’t you position yourself where the pilot can clearly see you, so they can realize their mistake and correct their course? And General Kornukov?”
“…Yes?”
“Perhaps you can forward me a complete report by tomorrow on how a commercial airliner was able to elude the Far East Air Force while flying in a straight line?”
“…Our radar is down.”
Marshal Ustinov sat roughly down in a nearby swivel chair. “Excuse me?”
“An arctic gale blew down our radar a week ago, and we haven’t been able to complete repairs,” explained General Kornukov in an abashed voice.
The Marshal fought to restrain his anger. “If our radar was down, why did you proceed with the missile test?”
“…Because it wouldn’t make us look good if we delayed the test.”
“And how much better would it make us look if we shot down a defenseless civilian airliner filled with who knows how many hundreds of innocent men, women and children?!” Ustinov demanded.
“...Not very good?”
Ustinov didn’t even bother to answer the question. Instead he got up, put down the microphone, and walked out of the room.
It was only when he had left the control room that he realized that he had made the exact same call as Stanislov Petrov had.
Marshal Ustinov didn’t know how many hours he had been driving around the streets of Moscow. Eventually he found himself in the parking lot of Central Clinical Hospital.
The members of the Politburo had all taken their turns sitting at Secretary-General Andropov’s bedside during his coma, so Ustinov knew where he was being kept. So after finding out when visiting hours began, he went into the nearest waiting room and sat down. At this late hour, he had the room entirely to himself.
On the waiting room's mounted television, Gorbachev was making his late-night broadcast. It was after the station should have gotten off the air, just as he had promised in his letter. Ustinov wondered how many insomniacs there might be in Moscow right now who were actually staying up to watch. Regardless of the man's audacity, he was sitting calmly in the news anchor's seat like it belonged to him.
“It seems to me that the best way to answer American inanity is not to sink to their level, but to prove ourselves to be the adults in the room,” he was saying. “The Pershing missiles are an obvious provocation—we should quietly point this out, with perhaps a reminder of what happened when we sent our missiles to Cuba in 1962. The American public, in contrast with many of their leaders, seem like a peaceful people, just as we Russians would prefer an honorable peace to war.
“It doesn’t take a genius to see why there is a disconnect between the American people and their president, and that’s because there are secrets being kept. And not even secrets that would be useful to keep from us and from their own people, but petty secrets, secrets of shame. It will not surprise you to learn that the Politburo have our own share of petty secrets we keep from you, the people of the Soviet Union. I pledge to do my part to expose any secret that will not do lasting harm to our great nation, a process I’m calling ‘glasnost’. This, alongside perestroika [reform] I believe to be the best way that our Union might move forward into the Twenty-First Century. In these ways I hope to truly be a comrade of the people, instead of merely their leader.”
While Gorbachev was making this speech, a text crawl underneath was summarizing the world news that would usually be delivered when the station went back on the air the next day: President Far Shooter still in the hospital, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi survives his fourth assassination attempt, and the Vega 1 lander successfully touched down on the surface of Venus.
Marshal Ustinov found that he was easily able to follow both speech and news feed. It seemed like a useful way to convey information, and he wondered if it would catch on in the future.
…And then the station finally ended its news day and went off the air. It would still be seven more hours before Ustinov could see how the Secretary General was doing.
He stared at nothing for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, with a deep sigh, he pulled The Elements of Harmony out of his pocket, and started up where he had left off on his second pass through the book: on the subject of war.
Mud was Sergeant Ustinov’s primary memory of WWII. That, and his continuing failure to keep his ever-diminishing squad safe from the Germans.
They had been lucky enough to miss most of the Battle of Stalingrad, but once the Nazi retreat began, Sergeant Ustinov’s work really began. First the commissioned officers were picked off by German snipers, leaving him in charge. And then they crossed the border into Ukraine, into the territories the enemy had firmly occupied before the failed invasion of Mother Russia.
What they had seen had sickened them. The Germans were not merely conquerors, replacing the leaders of the territories they had taken by combat. No, instead they were monsters: killing or raping anything that moved. And then there were the huge Jewish populations of Eastern Europe, shipped off by the millions to be exterminated like vermin.
As a result of this utter contempt for all non-Aryans, the retreating Nazi army had to fight its way through an incensed population eager for revenge. And despite that fact they took every opportunity to lay cruel booby-traps behind them, traps that the pursuing Russian troops continually fell afoul of, or slowed them down enough for the German sniper to have his way with them. Each trap was inevitably followed by a mocking sign planted on the side of the road with rhyming Russian stanzas. Soon Ustinov’s men were just as infuriated with the Germans as the Ukrainians were, just as willing to see them as inhuman, just as the Germans had been treating everyone else, were still treating everyone else, despite the obvious evidence piling up as to who was going to win this war.
They found Fritz buried under a shaking pile of snow shortly after crossing the Pripyat at Cherkasy. He had a rusty bayonet wound in his side, and he spoke perfect Russian. On being dug up, he surrendered himself as a prisoner of war. To the Sergeant, it was obvious that he was telling the truth when he told them that he had become as sick of his people’s acts as everyone else had, and was trying his best to escape the war entirely. For Ustinov, the proof of this was his memories of the handwriting of those mocking signs, each one shakier than the last, the last few peppered with spots of blood—punishment for balking at the words he was being ordered to translate. But the soldiers saw an easy target: if Fritz had written the signs, then surely he had planned the traps as well. His hand was so sure (now), so that must mean he was the sniper as well.
Matters came to a head in the city of Vinnitsa. This was the point where Ustinov’s squad had caught up with the Eastern Front. Ustinov’s excuses that he was merely holding Fritz captive until they could reach the proper authorities to try him could no longer hold water because here was the rest of the Russian Army, busy using any available wall for use by the firing squad.
While his men waited their turn to use the kangaroo court, Ustinov spent time with Fritz, hearing stories of his travels before the war, and of all the Russian friends he had made in the 30’s—not an easy time for a German to travel freely in the young Soviet Union. Ustinov arranged for Fritz to tell fairy tales to the children of Vinnitsa, so many of whom had been orphaned by the Nazis in ‘43, or before that by the Stalinist purge of ’38. The rest of his free time was treating his men to as much rich food as they could stand, followed by bringing them to the front of the crowd watching the firing squad, to catch every squalid detail of deaths both exact and horrifically botched.
Eventually, Fritz was duly tried and convicted of the crime of being a German, of obeying orders when the alternative was torture followed by death followed by desecration of the corpse. The Sergeant gave a bloodthirsty speech to the ravenous jury, convincing them that a hanging, if done in just the wrong way, was infinitely more agonizing a death than that by firing squad, and they had agreed. After that, it was a simple matter to arrange for a rotted rope. Fritz gagged and turned blue before the rope failed, and the soldiers, finally gutted on German suffering, turned and walked away. Ustinov’s group left Vinnitsa the next week, headed by a green general who got himself shot a few days later. And Fritz presumably lived the rest of his life in Vinnitsa, telling stories and making friends.
Waking up, Marshal Ustinov reflected that this was the first time he had thought about poor Fritz since 1944. Overall, he decided that Markism was a wonderful dream, a dream worth pursuing even if human nature made it absolutely impossible that it ever be completely realized.
In this way, it was exactly like Communism.
“He’s awake! He’s awake! The Secretary General is awake!”
Ustinov looked over at the clock. Visiting hours were due to start in less than five minutes. He got up from the waiting room chair he had been sleeping in, worked out the kinks in his back, put on his pea-green coat, and made his way to Yuri Andropov’s hospital room.
The Marshal waited patiently outside while doctors and nurses saw to their revived patient. Several pieces of equipment were removed from the room, to be replaced by others he didn’t recognize. Those items that stayed were all familiar to him—there was little else he could do during his long visits of the comatose patient besides examine the various beeping and dripping machines, and interrogate hapless nurses and aides to learn what each of them did. As with his handling of Fritz, his learning the Quran before the Afghan War, or his study of the Elements of Harmony, it all formed a pattern in Dimitri Ustinov’s life: he always had to have some measure of control in every situation, no matter how helpless. Or failing that, superior understanding.
“Marshal? Is that you Marshal?” came a weak voice from within the hospital room after the doctors and their crews had finally vacated.
Ustinov walked in. “Yes, Secretary-General, it is me.”
Secretary-General Andropov looked awful. All the blood had drained out of his face, leaving his lips blue and his skin that grayish-blue color you see in meat beginning to spoil. The whites of his eyes were pink, and clouded over. And most of his hair had fallen out. When he heard the military man approaching, he reached out blindly to grasp weakly upon his hands. “Now is not the time to waste with titles, Comrade. Is there anybody else from the Politburo here?”
Ustinov looked down upon the clammy bony fingers resting atop his hands—it felt like being held by a corpse. “Not yet,” he answered his leader. “I can summon them if you’d like.”
“Don’t bother. You’re the only one of them I respect. The rest are equal parts back-biters and capitalist scum.” He had to stop for a coughing fit, if the faint wheezes he was able to summon up were even deserving of the term. “They told me the truth.”
“The truth?”
“That I’m never getting out of this white-washed room. The Soviet Union is in a crisis, the worst we’ve faced since Hitler. That Far Shooter has us on the ropes. And the only person I trust to take care of him is you.”
Marshal Ustinov stepped back, removing his hands from their unpleasant embrace. “I must respectfully decline,” Ustinov said. “All I know is troop movement, tactics. How to win battles. And if you remember, my track record at that has not been very good lately.”
“And that’s exactly what we need at this moment in history! You remember how we stopped Hungary from falling to the capitalists in ’56?”
“Actually, that was just you,” Ustinov said, trying to suppress his memories of the official records of the purge, with their exact account of how brutally the aborted revolution was crushed.
“And then Prague in ’68, Kabul in ’79, Warsaw in ’81,” Andropov continued, reciting the name of atrocity after atrocity. “It took us, together, to bring in the tanks, again and again, to save the Communist cause and remind our allies who was in charge. And in between, crushing the dissidents and breaking the wills of sovereign people, because only after they’ve been broken can they be indoctrinated into the truth of world-wide Communism. Well now it’s Moscow in ’85, and it will take more than tanks to crush the Far Shooters and Thatchers on the outside, and the Romanovs and Gorbachevs on the inside. It will take you! Marshal, you’ve all I’ve got! Are you sure you won’t reconsider?”
Ustinov shook his head. And then, realizing that the half-blind Andropov probably couldn’t see his gesture, he said, “No.”
The man in the hospital bed sighed. “Then you leave me no choice. I had hoped that you would make the decision, so the world would know that it was the act of a living man facing up to reality, instead of the act of a corpse that doesn’t know that it’s dead yet. Marshal, I order you to initiate a nuclear first strike against the Americans.”
Ustinov felt his blood suddenly turn nearly as cold as Andropov’s. “What?! How can you do such a thing?”
“It’s the only way out, Marshal. The only way to bring those arrogant Westerners to their knees, along with everyone else who’s been mocking us for decades and that American president with his crazy religion. I just know he’s the one who gave me this cancer! They think we’re weak and pathetic, Marshal. They make fun of us behind our back, and plot how to dismember our great empire when the Soviet Union finally collapses and Communism finally dies. But I’ll show them! If we can’t win, then everybody dies! Everybody dies!”
Ustinov heard the sound of footsteps approaching. The footsteps of the other members of the Politburo, or perhaps just a doctor or nurse—somebody who would have no choice but to carry Andropov’s words out of the hospital. Out of the hospital and into reality.
Ustinov shut the door of the little room and turned the lock. “I wish I were a Markist,” he said, walking up to the morphine drip running into Andropov’s arm.
“Eh? What was that?” asked Andropov. “Why aren’t you busy launching missiles?”
“I said I wish I was a Markist,” repeated Ustinov as he opened up the valve on the drip-line. “At least long enough to come up with a non-violent solution to this problem.”
“Marshal, stop!” Andropov pleaded. “I ordered you to destroy the world. That is a direct order by the lord and master of the Soviet Union, the supreme leader of the Communist World!”
“But perhaps this is more like the Great Patriotic War,” Ustinov mused, “where only violence can save us.” He stepped away and watched the drug drain into Andropov’s vein.
Andropov pulled weakly at the taped-on tube, but he was too weak, and quickly growing weaker. “You…you traitor!” he gasped. “The Americans will turn this world into a wasteland…enslave with their money and culture…and you’ll wish…you’ll wish that you had ended this rotten world while…it was…still…pure…”
Ustinov waited several minutes to see if the Secretary General would say anything else. He then calmly walked over to the door, unlocked it, and pulled it open.
Instantly a whole barrage of men and women pushed their way in, equal parts medical professionals and political big-wigs. Only then, over the confused shouting, did Ustinov notice the competing wails of the various monitors attached to the unconscious body of Yuri Andropov.
It was easy for Marshal Ustinov to sneak out of the room without being noticed.
Dimitri Ustinov had not murdered Yuri Andropov, in the sense of terminating his life signs.
But Yuri Andropov would never wake again.
And within twenty-four hours, Dimitri Ustinov will have left the land of his birth and greatest triumphs, never to return.
A pity that he didn’t think to order the dismantling of the automated system he had put in place in the wake of Stanislav Petrov’s brave decision not to launch the missiles under his authority. With the dilapidated command structure he left behind, such an order probably would have been carried out without anyone realizing that it had been issued by a traitor to the Soviet Union.
As it was, the only thing standing between earth and Armageddon was a creaky Russian computer.