Bombshell

by Allan, Barbara

  There had been an electrified charge in the air as the motorcade whisked the premier along Chicago’s Michigan Avenue amid signs that read: FISH AND GUESTS SMELL IN 3 DAYS!, GO TO THE MOON, LEAVE US ALONE!, and RUSSIAN ATROCITIES IN HUNGARY MUST BE ANSWERED! The lynch mob mood concerned Harrigan enough that he’d flown back to Washington that night to meet with his State Department boss, on whose shoulders rested the enormous responsibility of safeguarding Khrushchev.

  For decades, the Secret Service had protected not only the president of the United States but any visiting dignitaries. Recently, however, a new security division had been formed in the State Department to handle the ever-increasing number of foreign guests; the world was growing smaller, it seemed, even as living on it grew more dangerous.

  Many of these agents, Harrigan included, had been culled from the ranks of the Secret Service. Protecting Khrushchev was their first assignment. Harrigan wished they could have gotten their feet wet with a much smaller fish, but they were stuck instead with this big barracuda.

  “I think we should cut the trip short,” Harrigan told Bill Larsen, his chief.

  He and Larsen had known each other for over ten years, working the White House Detail together. They had both gone after the coveted top spot in the new division, but Bill—Harrigan’s senior officer by a few years—had landed the position, putting a strain on their friendship.

  Seated behind the massive, cluttered mahogany desk in his executive office, Larsen—middle-aged, brown-haired, average, even undistinguished looking (always a plus in this work), wearing a rumpled Brooks Brothers suit and a twelve-hour stubble—gave Harrigan a hard stare.

  A portrait of Eisenhower peered over the shoulder of Harrigan’s former colleague/new boss, as if Ike were curious to hear Harrigan’s thoughts, while an American flag stood at attention in the corner. A wall clock with the division seal read just after midnight.

  “I say we go straight from Chicago,” Harrigan said, “to that photo-op farm in Iowa. Get our boy grinning with his fellow pigs and then put his big ass on his big-ass airplane and ship him back to Siberia or wherever-the-hell.”

  Larsen thought about that for a moment. “Skip L.A. altogether, you mean.”

  “Skip it. Why borrow trouble?”

  Larsen thought some more; then he slowly shook his head. “Ike won’t like it.”

  Harrigan sat forward, put a hand on the desk. “Fuck Ike,” he said, with a sneering nod at the portrait. “Would Ike like some more ugly incidents? Maybe he’d like a dead premier for supper, and atomic war for dessert?”

  “Are you on amphetamines again, Jack?”

  Harrigan sighed. “Bill—it’s getting hot out there… and I’m not talking about the goddamn weather.”

  “I know… I know.” Larsen sat and brooded; then he pounded his desk with a fist. “Goddamn that fat little bastard! Why can’t he just keep his big mouth shut? Doesn’t he know anything about diplomacy? Can’t he just sit back and look at the scenery and shut the hell up?”

  Harrigan sighed, shrugged, nodded. “Even his own people can’t control him. He’s like Al Capone or something.”

  “Al Capone we could put in jail—this jerk we have to wine and dine.” Larsen let out a weary blast of air. “Maybe the president could broadcast an appeal….”

  “For what?”

  “Patience on the public’s part. To cut the guy some slack, the way you do some hick from the country who shows up at the family reunion with the manners of a billy goat.”

  Harrigan smirked. “And how does that work, exactly? You think Nikita’s people won’t tell him what the prez is saying about him in the press?”

  “Ike could simply imply that—”

  “That the public should just ignore the commie dung being flung their way?”

  A small shrug. “It could work.”

  “Yeah, and if we all believe, really really believe, maybe Tinker Bell won’t fucking die.” Harrigan shifted in the chair. “Anyway, that’s not the real issue here, Bill. We have the most volatile man in the world heading into the most volatile city in the world…. And I’m not getting the support I need from the mayor.”

  Larsen’s eyes tightened as he sat forward. “What do you mean?”

  “You know how many men Poulson’s giving me? How about a hundred?”

  Larsen’s eyes ping-pong-balled. “Jesus Christ! We had three thousand agents in Washington—two thousand in New York!” The division chief leaned back in his chair, looking like he’d been poleaxed. “Why do I think that prick Poulson would just love to have Khrushchev take a bullet on his turf?”

  “I don’t know. Because he would?”

  Larsen stood, leaning forward, hands touching the desktop. “Jack, I’ll call Mayor Poulson personally—I’ll remind the S.O.B. which side of the bread the politics is buttered on.”

  “Good. Thank you.” For that much, at least.

  Larsen was saying, “You’ll have more men than a damn hundred, or I’ll have his honor’s head on a stick.”

  “Either way that goes,” Harrigan said with a smile, and shook hands with his old friend, “sounds good to me.”

  With the meeting over, Harrigan stopped at a water fountain to take a pill; then he spoke to another burning-the-midnight-oil agent in the hallway for a moment, just small talk between coworkers, and was heading down the shining tile corridor of the State Department building, when Larsen suddenly called him back to his office.

  “Hey!”

  Harrigan walked back and stood before Larsen, who was poised at the doorway.

  “I just got word from Central Intelligence,” the chief said. He looked shaken, standing there rigidly. “One of their agents in Formosa is warning of an assassination attempt.”

  Harrigan’s eyes narrowed. “Target K?”

  “Target K,” Larsen said.

  Well, it looked like Khrushchev’s speech to the United Nations had reached the ears of Nationalist China.

  “That’s just great,” Harrigan said tersely, “that’s just swell—well, hell, why don’t I round up every Oriental in the greater Los Angeles area, and call it even!”

  Larsen shook his head, ashen. “I’ll see that you get that manpower.”

  “You’d better,” Harrigan said. “Or there could be a new man in your chair.”

  “Maybe, Jack,” Larsen said, kidding on the square. “But it sure as hell won’t be you…. Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Sure, Bill.”

  “Name it.”

  “Pray.”

  The Air Force 707, bearing Khrushchev and his entourage, rolled to a smooth stop in front of the hangar, and polished metal glistened in the California sunlight. Immediately, the ground crew pushed the heavy aluminum staircase-on-wheels to its door, which after another few minutes opened slowly, with theatrical melodrama.

  First down the steps were three of Harrigan’s men from the State Department Security Division; on their heels were four of Khrushchev’s personal Okhrana guards, elite uniformed members of the KGB, the Russian spy agency. Then came the premier himself, wearing a lightweight tan suit; he was smiling, waving his homburg hat, apparently in a good mood. Thank God for small favors, Harrigan thought.

  Close behind him was plump, pleasant Mrs. Nina Khrushchev, attired in a simple navy dress, being helped down the steps by her twenty-four-year-old blond, blue-eyed son, Sergei. An older son might have been on Nina’s other arm, if his plane hadn’t been shot down in flames back in World War II by the Germans.

  Next were Khrushchev’s two daughters, Rada and Julia, both in their early thirties, one blonde, the other brunette, fetchingly framed in the jetliner’s exit doorway, debunking any notion that Russian women were strictly shotputting babushkaed beasts at the Olympics. The two sisters were downright pretty, Harrigan thought.

  Finally, bringing up the rear, were the bureaucrats and intellectuals, the entourage Khrushchev insisted he have with him: Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Ambassador Mikhail Menshikov, Atomi
c Energy executive Vasily Emelyanov, Minister of Education Vyacheslav Elyutin, and, among others, the editor of Pravda, Pavel Satyukov.

  The mayor of Los Angeles, Norris Poulson—a beefy bucket-headed character with dark hair and dark-rimmed glasses, his black suit a perfect choice, if he’d been attending a funeral—stepped forward to greet Khrushchev.

  “We welcome you to Los Angeles, the City of Angels,” Poulson said, with all the enthusiasm of a white Southern sheriff meeting his daughter’s colored boyfriend, “where our city motto is that the impossible always happens.”

  Well, Harrigan thought, that was easily the dumbest goddamn city motto he’d ever heard.

  Everyone waited for the mayor to continue—some minor speech seemed appropriate, some small recognition of this important personage in their presence. But only an embarrassing silence followed.

  Khrushchev’s smile dropped, his eyes narrowed. Holding a four-page speech in his hands, the premier—who obviously knew damned well he’d been insulted—growled only one line from it, before stuffing it angrily back in his pocket. Oleg Troyanovsky didn’t bother to translate.

  Harrigan clenched his teeth and cursed the mayor under his breath; it was clear Poulson had intentionally snubbed Khrushchev, who was now moving briskly, angrily, past the small crowd of stunned well-wishers.

  One of the crowd—a dark young man in a short-sleeved white shirt and denim tie—called out in Russian to Khrushchev, stopping the premier in his tracks. The young man appeared to be of European stock, with just a tinge of Asian in the eyes—or was that Harrigan’s imagination running wild, in light of the Formosa threat?

  The agent tensed as he moved quickly between the two, prepared for anything, his coat unbuttoned to give easy access to his shoulder-holstered .38. But Khrushchev only smiled back at the young man, providing a wordless non-response to whatever it was the youth had said.

  Harrigan would have to ask the translator later. Right now, however, the urgency of the moment was to get the premier and his entourage safely into those waiting, bulletproof limousines.

  As the caravan of cars slowly drew away, Harrigan—in the limo directly behind Khrushchev—looked back at the hangar, where the press and the small crowd were drifting in this direction or that one, dispersing…

  … except for the young man in the white shirt, who intently watched them go, eyes unblinking, smile frozen.

  Harrigan filed the face in his mental cabinet and settled back in the seat, hoping to Christ that Mayor Norris Poulson was wrong about Los Angeles.

  That it wasn’t the city where the impossible happened.

  The goddamn possible was bad enough.

  Chapter Three

  POETIC JUSTICE

  THE NOTION TO kill Khrushchev hadn’t come slowly; it arrived to him in one swift instant—not a thought, but an impulse, a need, a duty….

  In America he was called Jonas Veres—Veres Jonas in his native land (Hungarians used their last names first)—though he was not yet accustomed to it, slow at assimilating, a reluctant exile. It was difficult to realize he had been in the United States for almost three years already, coming here following the revolution in Hungary in 1956.

  Before the bloodbath, Jonas had been a student at the university in Budapest, where he would often pass time at the Writer’s Union, and dabble in poetry…. But his major passion was history.

  Through history he learned the tortured but fascinating facts about his country’s convoluted past—a past riddled with foreign invasion and suppression, first by the Asian warlord Attila the Hun, then the Romans, Turks, Austrians, Germans, and now… the latest in a seemingly endless chain of invaders… the Russians. A joke that circulated the campus among the students was: What time is it… and who’s ruling us now?

  Perhaps it was inherent in the temperament of the Hungarian people—peaceful and happy—that they seemed so susceptible to conquest. Or maybe it was their willingness to make the best of a bad situation, a positive attitude that had a negative result by keeping them from attaining the freedom they so longed for.

  Those days were over. The “gentle” people had had enough of rape and pillage. And of course invaders always seemed to forget that when they rape the women of a victim nation, they sow their warrior’s seed into the blood of the conquered people.

  Jonas had been only eight years of age when Hitler was defeated by the Russian Army in the spring of 1945; with this victory, there was great hope among the people of Hungary—hope that they would regain their land, so brutally taken in the war, and at long last be able to govern themselves.

  But Stalin crushed that hope—along with any resistance to the new communist regime he had installed—and the Russians ruled with a force that made the Hungarians practically long for the vanquished Germans. The irony was not lost on a college-age student of history like Jonas: the liberators of the Hungarian people had suddenly become their captors.

  Almost overnight, street signs came down and old accepted names changed to new strange Russian ones; and, too, Soviet emblems quickly replaced Hungarian ones, shattering any sense of place, shredding national pride, even as schools began teaching the Russian language, twisting the Hungarian tongue in yet another unmerciful torture. Farmers lost their land, merchants their shops, and the workers any rights, as Russia moved like a hungry beast over the picturesque land, devouring everything in sight, a greedy monster spouting (between bites) nonsense about the “good of the people,” destroying a nation’s heritage in the name of collectivization and Soviet domination.

  Bad led to worse: next came the witch-hunts and executions by the Russian Secret Police—the dreaded NKVD—of any “criminal” (real or imagined) who dared to criticize the new Russian government. Was it any wonder the people all but prayed for World War III to break out? If only the Americans would defeat the Russians, perhaps Hungary could again rise from the ashes…

  Then two things happened to bring back a glimmer of hope: Stalin died, and neighboring Poland revolted.

  Jonas, like all Hungarians, watched in awe as the crisis between the Polish citizens and Moscow—with Nikita Khrushchev now at the helm—boiled to a head. The result was astonishing: Khrushchev agreed that Russia’s satellite country could “choose its own path toward socialism,” and did not send in his troops!

  A bolstered Hungary took this cue, and on October 23, 1956, staged its own revolt, in the belief—the hope—that they too might win such concessions.

  The riot had ignited like spontaneous combustion, thanks to impassioned students like Jonas, and what had started on campus quickly spread throughout the country—writers, artists, teachers, laborers, merchants, peasants, even children, all picked up arms supplied to them by the Hungarian Army, who sided with the populace in the effort to drive the Russian government out. NKVD agents were shot on sight, and the few Russian tanks that did dare enter the cities received Molotov-cocktail welcome parties.

  And now it was the Russian street signs that came down, the Soviet emblems defaced, while statues of Stalin were toppled and spat upon and sledgehammered and even riddled with bullets. But the fervent patriotism—incited by Jonas and his fellow student rebels—had a righteousness that did not lose its high ground: there was no looting of broken store windows—even the professional thieves abstained.

  And after three intense, frenzied days of fighting, Hungary was rid of the communists. Elated, the people of the often-invaded land—for the first time in hundreds of years—went to sleep that night a free country.

  Jonas woke the following morning in bed next to his girlfriend, Eva. She too was a budding poet, her father a cobbler, much as his had been a baker; a year younger than him, a slender fair-haired blue-eyed beauty, Eva seemed nearly waif-like in comparison to the norm of Slavic zaftig farm girls. And for all his artistic and scholarly leanings, Jonas had something of the warrior in his blood—the Hun in his ancestry could be seen in an angular face Eva insisted had a pleasing “exotic” quality.

  “The Magyar i
n you,” she had reminded him that wonderful night, “it shows.”

  “Don’t speak foolishness,” he laughed.

  “They were fierce tribesman, you know. A thousand years ago they made a kingdom, here. Maybe you will be a poet king. Maybe you will help forge freedom. So few poets can make history….”

  Such talk came only after many cups of their nation’s sweet, delicious wine. Of course students shouldn’t have been drinking in the dormitory, a violation of university policy….

  As was spending the night together, which was an infraction that could have had both students expelled; but this was the new Hungary, and many such rules fell by the wayside that glorious night, including their previous precautionary use of birth control. With the promise of freedom, it suddenly seemed all right now to risk bringing another life into this better world.

  As morning sunlight streamed in through the slatted windows of the tiny dorm room, Jonas was enjoying the warmth of Eva’s nude body, running his hands along her slender curves, mentally composing a poem to her charms as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Her long blonde hair smelled of smoke from last night’s bonfire; but the acrid scent was perfume to him, a pleasing reminder of how the students had made a pile of communist books and propaganda pamphlets they’d ransacked from the Party’s bookshop, and hauled into the street, and set aflame.

  Suddenly the door to the dorm room burst open.

  “Jonas!”

  Pluck, a younger classman—his pale, smiling face dominated by wild eyes so brown they were almost black—was standing in the doorway. The boy was wearing a Soviet Secret Police hat with the emblem torn off, his brown hair sticking out from underneath it like straw.

  “Our resolutions are written!” Pluck blurted. “We’re taking them to Parliament….” Then he noticed Eva, who was hastily pulling a sheet up over her head, due to his unexpected entrance, and the boy shyly added, “Oh… hi, Eva.”