“Why does God hate me so much?” he moaned.
Actually, Samsonov had two jobs these days. In addition to being the HQ’s security czar, he was also the army’s liaison officer to the NKVD. He’d had no say in taking on this extra duty; it had simply been handed to him by his superiors, who had made it clear they wanted no trouble with the dreadful secret police and would blame him if they did.
This liaison duty took up about an hour a day. Mostly, it called for him to go through the NKVD overnight field reports and send the ones he deemed relevant upstairs to Army Central Command. But as the NKVD blacked out nearly everything from their own overnights before they ever got to him, the reports were always short and routine. It was just more paperwork for him, but he dealt with it.
His biggest problem with this extra duty was dealing with the Committee of the Revolution for the Protection of the People (CRPP), though their name meant nothing. In reality, they were Zmeya’s henchmen, his highly paid executioners. Always dressed in black trench coats and wearing matching black fedoras, just like their boss, they were all murderers, and two were actually mass murderers. If one person, or a few people, or hundreds, or even thousands, had to be liquidated for the Motherland, the CRPP would come up with a strategy and then execute it, many times personally.
The committee members had quickly developed a taste for New York City’s high life. In the first week alone, they’d ordered Samsonov to get them Cadillacs, yachts, motorcycles, jet skis, CD players, big-screen TVs, gold jewelry, and even boom boxes. He’d had no choice but to fulfill their demands.
But most of all, the CRPP members wanted mistresses, and trying to find the right kind of companions for them had become Samsonov’s nightmare. It was a poorly kept secret that Commissar Zmeya had met a woman immediately after arriving in New York City three days into the invasion. Her identity was still unknown to most people, even after more than a month. But those who’d seen her said she was nothing less than the most beautiful woman in America.
She was nothing less than a giant pain in the ass for Samsonov, at least he’d thought so at first. This was because the five CRPP members didn’t just want gorgeous mistresses of their own, they wanted ones who looked exactly like the commissar’s new girlfriend.
Samsonov thought it odd at first that the CRPPs wanted only what their commander had. But then, early in his liaison duty, he’d been given a top-secret photograph of the commissar’s latest mistress. Then he’d understood.
The photo wasn’t some hasty snapshot. It was a crisp and clear portrait that showed Zmeya’s new girlfriend sitting in a plush armchair, leaning forward a little, blond hair cascading down around her soft shoulders. Her enormous blue eyes caressed the lens; her soft red lips were set in an enigmatic half smile. She was wearing a tight black tuxedo jacket with no skirt, just black seamless nylons held up by garters and a pair of black high heels. Her frilly silk blouse was very low cut, almost completely exposing her breasts.
Samsonov had studied the photo many, many times.
To help him in his quest, he’d reached out to unsavory procurement agents working for the rackets. These were men who found beautiful female escorts in other parts of America and brought them to New York City to ply their trade. Every day since, a bright red-striped top-secret pouch would land on his desk with a thud. Inside were hundreds of photos of women in various stages of undress sent to him by these agents.
Samsonov’s first duty every morning was to go through the steamy photographs to see if any of the subjects measured up to what the CRPP wanted. It sounded like fun, but he’d come to hate it. Not just because none of the women ever came close to matching the commissar’s piece of sex candy, but because it also required Samsonov to interact with the NKVD sublieutenant, Boris Borski, a bottom feeder from the secret police’s gene pool.
The man was simply grotesque. Mid-thirties, but looking much older, Borski had a facial scar from badly sewn stitches, the result of a murder attempt gone awry. It stretched across his mouth from one ear to the other and looked like a hideous crooked smile. Borski also walked with a limp and was slightly hunchbacked due to other beatings he’d taken along the way. His hair was too long and always dirty—in defiance of regulations—and he was frequently wearing bits of his last meal somewhere on his chin.
Though officially in the Militsiya, Borski commanded one of the most brutal death squads in the Chekskis. The radical NKVD uniformed cops were cleaning up the city’s homeless problem by picking up dozens of people every night and making them disappear. Officially, the vagrants were being deported to New Jersey. Unofficially, none were making it that far across the Hudson River. Borski liked cutting their throats, something psychological there, and his men wanted to impress him. So every night, they made a bloody mess down on the Red Hook docks, where, for other Chekski execution squads, a bullet in the head and a shove in the water would do.
Graffiti showing a hastily drawn bloody smiley face had begun showing up on the streets of Lower Manhattan, always at the site of the latest homeless clearing actions. Serial killers and mass murderers liked to leave their marks. Borski was no different.
But like Samsonov, Borski had two jobs. He was also a willing errand boy for the CRPP. So, every morning he showed up in Samsonov’s office and waited for him to go through the new batch of photos and earmark a few possibilities for consideration. Then the human troll would lurch out of the office with the red-striped pouch in hand and head for 30 Rock.
These departures were never quick enough for Samsonov.
It took Samsonov the usual half hour to go through the day’s photographs.
Sublieutenant Borski walked in ten minutes into the process. Like every other day, Samsonov found nothing special in the bunch. But by indicating there might be a few possibilities, he knew Borski would leave his office that much quicker.
Samsonov put a paper clip on six photos and then threw everything back inside the red striped pouch. Borski grabbed it, spit in Samsonov’s office plant, then bounded down the hallway and to the elevators.
At least that was over.
Now Samsonov had to read the NKVD overnights and decide which ones to kick upstairs. Only then could he finally get to his more important duties.
He opened the blue envelope containing the NKVD reports that had arrived with the red-striped pouch. Last night, the Militsiya had conducted raids on the Upper West Side aimed at thwarting subversive activity. Twelve people were arrested. In the same time frame, Chekski sweeps in the West Village resulted in the roundup of forty-six homeless people who had been “processed.” That was it. Nothing new or interesting.
But Samsonov didn’t care. He stamped it approved and put it all back in the blue envelope. Then he called his orderly and told him to kick it upstairs.
On this transfer, the orderly handed him a memo from the MOP Building, two skyscrapers over. The message had been typed on pink paper, indicating the lowest possible security level. It was addressed to both Samsonov and his counterpart in the navy HQ next door.
It related in one paragraph that two orderlies working on the top floor of the MOP Building reported seeing a tiny airplane circling buildings inside MMZ around two that morning. The plane was brightly colored and had a strange engine noise. It had orbited the three military buildings on Fifth Avenue, flying level with their top floors and, at times, slowing to a hover. The aircraft’s landing gear consisted of two huge fat tires that were nearly as big as the plane itself. The orderlies said that the little plane seemed to be looking for something.
Samsonov lit his one and only cigarette of the day and blew the smoke toward his ceiling. A tiny airplane buzzing the MMZ?
What was this about?
He called his counterpart in the Navy Building and asked if he’d received the memo.
The navy man just laughed at him. “It was a prank, Samsonov,” he said.
“How so?”
“Your drunken soldiers broke into the old Macy’s department store building last night,” he explained. “They were still wanting to celebrate Victory Day, so they found some very large balloons—the Americans call them holiday floats. Your heroes filled one up with helium and let it go and it turned out to look like a beagle flying a doghouse. That’s what your eyewitnesses saw.”
Samsonov spent the next fifteen hours doing his rounds inside the army skyscraper.
It was close to midnight when he finally returned to his office on the forty-fourth floor. A tray on his desk containing a cup of borsht and a chunk of beef was stacked atop another tray holding a cup of goulash and a slice of Butterbrod. His dinner sitting on top of his lunch, all of it cold. Almost too tired to eat, but too hungry not to, he sat behind his desk and stuffed the napkin under his chin.
One bite into the goulash, his office lights blinked. He looked up and saw something flash by outside.
He walked over to the window searching for anything unusual in the night. But he found only the darkness cut by the crimson light coming from the NKVD’s big red star directly above him.
Then … the lights blinked again and there was another flash!
Samsonov saw it clearly this time. A streak of bright flames went right by his enormous east-facing window, leaving a long trail of sparks behind.
“Fireworks,” he groaned.
The victory celebration was revving up again on the streets below.
Samsonov wasn’t too surprised. Night comes, soldiers go off duty, get drunk, look for mischief, and find it. And why not? The city was theirs.
He started packing his briefcase. If it was going to be crazy inside the MMZ again, then he wanted to get to his billet on Sixth Avenue while he still could.
He was going to pick up his uniform jacket when there was another flash.
When he looked up, he saw a tiny airplane hovering outside his window.
A tiny airplane … with enormous front wheels.
Samsonov was staggered by the strangeness of this thing. It was painted in bright, swirling circus colors, and its nose was pointing almost straight up. Defying all laws of gravity, it was holding perfectly still in the air, fire pouring out from behind its propeller. And those tires—they were huge, bald, fat, and permanently set in the down position.
It looked like a gigantic flying toy—and was so close to the window Samsonov could see its shadowy pilot looking back at him.
Suddenly, the plane’s engine let out an ear-piercing screech. Its nose went down, and in another flash, it was gone.
Samsonov ran back to the window and pressed himself up against the giant pane. The weird little airplane was now flying around the top of the Navy Building next door. Its fiery exhaust made it impossible to miss.
Clearly, the MOP cleaning crew hadn’t seen a holiday float the night before.
They’d seen this thing.
Samsonov grabbed the phone and hastily dialed the navy’s air barge on the East River. A sleepy officer answered.
Samsonov identified himself and then asked, “Are your planes operational?”
The man replied that they were.
“Get both into the air now!” Samsonov ordered. “There’s an unknown aircraft over the MMZ. We must intercept it.”
“Why are you bothering me? I don’t take orders from the army.”
Samsonov was furious. “But as an army staff officer I can recommend your transfer to Kamchatka,” he yelled back. “Now do it.”
He slammed down the phone and quickly returned to the window. The plane was still in sight, but now it was flying around the top floor of the MOP Building. Samsonov watched in amazement as it went into its fantastic hovering maneuver again, stopping outside the skyscraper’s penthouse for a few seconds before rocketing away.
Nearly a hundred of his building guards were on duty on the plaza below. All of them were looking up at the strange little plane. Hundreds more soldiers stuck with overnight paperwork duty were at the windows of other MMZ buildings. Like Samsonov, they were all following the circus plane’s every move.
Where were the Yaks? Samsonov was fuming. They were supposed to be ready for takeoff at a moment’s notice. But there was no sign of them.
Suddenly, the little plane’s flight pattern changed. As if the pilot sensed something, the plane stopped in mid-orbit around the top of the MOP Building, pointed its nose west and left the area at high speed.
The Yaks arrived thirty seconds later. They went over the MMZ at seven hundred miles per hour, making lots of noise but doing little else. Once they’d departed, Samsonov strained to find the little plane in the night again, but it was no use. It was gone.
Its image was seared onto his retinas, though. The astonishing maneuvers, the speed, the hang and hover before darting away again?
It reminded him of a huge flying insect, or even a hummingbird, flitting here and there.
Looking for something.
Chapter Six
May 4
With the victory celebrations complete, Phase Two of the Russian invasion of New York City was scheduled to begin. But, in fact, its changes were already being seen.
During the first month of the Okupatsi, the military had deployed its units in urban combat alignments. Heavily armed patrols, manning lots of weapons positions and guard posts, rain or shine, sleeping outdoors and eating meals on the curbstone.
Now more permanent installations were being established around the city. Unit command centers, security checkpoints, guardhouses, outposts on the periphery of nearly every structure with a roof over its head. Large apartment buildings all over New York were being transformed into barracks; smaller ones were being turned into mess halls.
The job of the Russian forces now was to become entrenched in Russkiy-NYC and get ready for the next phase when ordered to do so by Moscow.
Because Phase Two was more hands-on, the Sostva’s staff had instituted daily morning briefings in the joint ops suite at the top of the old Simon & Schuster Building. The meetings would be run by Colonel Gagarin, the one-eyed man who knew it all.
The first one commenced at 0800 hours, three days after May Day. The Sostva commanders walked in, right on time, Alexei, Kartunov, and Marshal MOP, along with their security details. The three officers looked hung-over and sleep-deprived, hardly a surprise. They’d celebrated May Day as vigorously as their troops and were still paying the price.
The commanders took their seats and listened impassively as Colonel Gagarin first explained why these morning briefings were necessary. Then he rattled off eight pages of numbers Moscow deemed important for Phase Two. Total kilowatts cranked out by the restarted Astoria Power Station so far. How many supply ships were expected to arrive from Russia in the next twenty-four hours. How many meals would be served to the troops in the field over the same time period. On and on. All the numbers were positive; every one of them proof that the Okupatsi continued moving along smoothly.
But the three commanders were only interested in one number: the latest payout from the rackets. Now that the Red Hand godfathers were out of the way, that number should represent an enormous increase in profits for Moscow. And this would be good for the Sostva, because in the eyes of the Kremlin, the higher number, the better the job they were doing here in New York.
As it turned out, Gagarin had saved the best for last.
As of that morning, he revealed, the magic number had reached the equivalent of a million dollars a day in pure profit flowing into Russian coffers.
Awake now and feeling a lot better, the Sostva commanders gave themselves a round of applause, so pleased by what they’d heard. The staff officers joined in. Meeting over, the commanders got up to leave.
But after a stern nod from Gagarin, the navy’s chief staff officer, who was in charge of the city’s air defenses, timidly raised his han
d and told the high commanders that, a couple of hundred people reported seeing a tiny aircraft flying around the MMZ the night before. Nothing serious, just something that looked like it was from a circus. The Yaks had been scrambled but the little plane had flown away before they arrived.
The still-jovial Sostva officers just laughed. They hadn’t been aware of this incident or the earlier MOP sighting. Nor had they heard the Yaks roaring overhead around midnight. A vodka sleep was a deep sleep.
“A circus plane?” Alexei finally asked, the three commanders sitting back down. “Are you sure?”
“Many people reported it as such,” the navy officer said.
“The army HQ’s security chief among them,” Gagarin added, slightly adjusting his eye patch. “This craft was universally described as being the size of a compact car but able to fly very fast. It was definitely not a military airplane. It was painted in carnival colors, had enormous front wheels and a very noisy engine. It flew around our three military HQ buildings for a few minutes and then just vanished—like a ghost, many said.”
The high commanders were more puzzled than concerned. But it was paramount to them that Moscow not hear of anything that might blemish their success—not even a tale of some weird little samolyot-nevidimka, or ghost plane, flying within the supposedly secure airspace above their conquered city. The Gagarin story of the ghost plane had be discredited and quashed.
But how?
A few days into the invasion, MOP had revived one of the city’s old AM radio stations.
Red Radio, which now ran twenty-four hours a day, played endless propaganda pieces in both Russian and English, bragging about how well the Okupatsi was going. Every three or four hours, an announcer would break in and read the list of rules and regulations for both soldiers and New York’s civilians, followed by some innocuous around-the-town stories. Then it would go back to the propaganda.
Battle for America Page 3
