Back Channel: A novel

by Stephen L Carter

  The captain had been banished to his cabin after quarreling with the political officer, who had refused to let them circle around the storm. The deck officer shared the captain’s view, but had prudently kept silent.

  “Chto eto?” said the helmsman, pointing to a long black shape that had appeared without warning off the port bow. It looked like a whale, except that it was flying.

  “It’s a plane,” said the first mate, also in Russian. “Hold course, Comrade. He will make way.”

  The two men on the bridge watched in fascination as the large aircraft bounced along beside them in the storm, not two hundred feet above the roiling sea. The plane had to be American. Nobody else would be so crazy. The craft had twin propellers and a transparent nose cone. They hadn’t seen it swooping in because, except for the nose, the entire fuselage was painted black.

  On the deck below, the soldiers were scurrying for cover, and for a moment the first mate was worried. Then he realized that their fear was not of being attacked but of being seen. The political officer, wearing an unmarked greatcoat, had moved to the gunwale, where he used an ungainly East German camera to snap photographs of the intruder.

  “Who are they?” said the helmsman.

  “They are brave men,” said the mate, a good-humored Ukrainian named Evanishyn. “They are risking their lives to follow us.”

  The ship rolled again, this time to port, and the plane climbed away. When they settled again, it was overhead.

  “We’re risking our lives, too,” the helmsman grumbled. “For what?”

  “For the Motherland. For what we carry below.”

  “Which is what?”

  “I am sure you have guessed, Comrade.” Evanishyn nodded toward the political officer, still snapping his pictures. “My mother always said you can tell a bird by its droppings.”

  II

  Another man came in. He wore a threadbare sweater, but the four white stars on each epaulet told them that he held the rank of lieutenant commander in the Red Navy. Ordinarily, an officer of such rank would not be caught dead on a freighter, even the shining new Poltava. His presence signaled the importance of the mission, and his orders, they had been told, were to be followed without hesitation.

  “Give me the field glasses,” he said.

  A fresh wave rolled the ship hard to starboard, but the men were braced. Down on the deck, the chain securing one of the trucks was slipping, and a pair of crewmen fought their way toward it. The plane was still directly above, seeming almost to hover in the storm. Much lower and it would have struck the crane assembly, which extruded well above the wheelhouse in the center of the ship.

  The naval officer lifted the glasses. “It is an American reconnaissance plane,” he said after a moment’s study. “They designate it the P-2H, or Neptune. The dark paint makes it difficult to make out. They call themselves the Flying Phantoms.”

  “What is it doing?” asked Evanishyn.

  “Taking photographs of your ship, Comrade.” He pointed to the trucks ranked on the deck. “He hopes to discover your cargo.”

  “The cargo is mostly below.”

  The plane had dipped lower again and was now just twenty yards off the port bow. The naval officer continued his study. “He will photograph the cranes and the hatches. From this the American analysts will try to calculate the size and weight of the cargo.” He lowered the glasses. “Our destroyer escort is less than half an hour behind. Were our orders not otherwise, we could shoot him down.”

  Evanishyn was alarmed. “We are not at war, Comrade.”

  The lieutenant commander gave a tired smile. “We shall be soon.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Come, Comrade. You yourself have reached the same conclusion. Sooner or later, the Americans will find out what we are ferrying to Cuba.”

  “And then?”

  “And then they will destroy us.”

  THREE

  Uncle Sam Wants You

  I

  On Monday morning, Niemeyer called on Margo in class for the first time. He was once more rolling along the stage, this time telling the class of an evacuation exercise the government had performed nine years ago (“Maybe some of you remember? No? Children. Pah!”) and how, although there had been some small logistical glitches, such as the dispersal site in Ohio that nobody had thought to tell the Ohioans about, for the most part things went as planned. Thousands of essential federal employees reached their designated resettlement areas, far from likely Soviet targets. The exercise lasted three days.

  “After the drill was over,” said Niemeyer, twisting his good hand in an air like a conjurer, “they held the usual meetings, slapping each other on the back, handing around congratulatory letters and medals, and no doubt trying to figure out how to handle certain unexpected pregnancies among employees of the fairer sex”—from the students, more gasps than laughter, although Littlejohn brayed like a donkey—“but then, when everyone was through shaking hands and slapping backs, one fellow spoke up. An unpredicted and unfortunate burst of pure honesty. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘Of course, if this had been the real thing, I’d have skipped the evacuation. I’d have gone to find my wife and kids instead. I’d rather die with my family than live doing my duty.’ And at that point the whole thing fell apart. Everybody was suddenly demanding to know what provisions were being made to evacuate their families to places of safety, and so on. The final Civil Defense report on the exercise is classified, but I’m sure you can imagine what it said. Let’s play guess-the-conclusion, shall we?”

  He selected, as first victim, a boy she didn’t know, a clever junior named Chance.

  “The report,” said Chance, without hesitation, “would have said that evacuation was impossible because of the problem of families. Further—”

  “Not even wrong.” Niemeyer picked someone else, whose answer was not even wronger.

  Then he spun toward the middle aisle. “Miss Jensen. Explain to them.”

  Margo opened her mouth at once, but for two full seconds not a sound emerged. A part of her head was still down under the stands at the stadium. Then she heard the titters and remembered whose granddaughter she was. “If we’re assuming that the report told the truth”—and here she found herself inserting a Niemeyer-like aside—“not often the case with official government documents”—this won her a few appreciative chuckles—“then there’s only one possible conclusion. Nobody knows how people will respond under the pressure of the real thing.” Her voice gathered strength. “We can speculate in the classroom, and the Civil Defense planners can speculate around a table. They can take surveys, study data, calculate numbers with their slide rules and their computers. But in the end they’re talking about people. Trying to predict what people will do. Family versus duty. Obligation versus fear. All the dynamics that make everyday life so rich and complex and unpredictable. We can’t predict how people will behave with a nuclear warhead on the way until there’s a nuclear warhead on the way. We have no data. We can’t run a realistic test. So the only right answer is that there is no right answer.”

  Niemeyer gave her a long look while the class waited. “Not entirely wrong,” he grunted: high praise. “The human factor is indeed the most dangerous part of any equation. Capricious, mercurial, given to spasms of emotionalism. Fear and anger are the big ones to worry about, but there are others, too. Ordinary covetousness and lust, of course. And also the regrettable tendency to overestimate one’s own capabilities—what Joe Stalin called ‘dizziness due to success’—and the odd unexpected moment of bravery or integrity or whatever this week’s admirable character trait might be. Enough. Hour’s up. Go forth and err.” But the great man’s appraising eye was on Margo, and she understood at once that she was not included in the general dismissal.

  “I told you, you’re his favorite,” muttered Littlejohn as he filed past.

  “He likes you,” whispered Annalise Seaver, her best friend, not specifying whether she meant Niemeyer or Lit
tlejohn. “Be careful.”

  Margo ignored them. By the time she reached the front, Niemeyer was gone. In the back hall behind the stage, she found him waiting, as she knew she would. A pair of acolytes stood in the doorway, like bodyguards.

  “Miss Jensen. A word,” said Niemeyer, just like last week. “Walk with me.”

  II

  “Ever met Kennedy?” he asked as they followed the same path as last time across the quad. She half expected to see the alumnus with the camera.

  “Once,” she said, very surprised.

  “Tell me.”

  “He was campaigning in New York, and he was talking to teenagers. They wanted the cameras to catch a few Negroes in the group. My grandmother is well connected in politics, so I wound up in the pictures.” For some reason, she was blushing. “I didn’t talk to him or anything. He told us how important it was to get a good education, and about how his own father started with nothing and built a fortune. How America’s the best country in the world. Probably fifteen minutes.”

  “This was two years ago?”

  “Yes. Summer of 1960.”

  “So you were, what? In high school?”

  “I was seventeen. About to start my senior year.”

  “Any reason he’d remember you?”

  Again the question surprised her. “I don’t see why.”

  “Well, they do say our President has an eye for the ladies. Ah. Here we are.” At the government department once more. His acolytes marched past, just like last time, but Niemeyer remained on the step, holding the door. He lifted a hand, palm upward, and gestured toward the entrance. “In you go.”

  “I have Professor Hadley’s political anthropology seminar in five minutes. It’s the other way.”

  “Tris Hadley is a fool, and political anthropology is humbug.”

  “Yes, well, I still—”

  “My office, Miss Jensen. Now.”

  Margo hesitated. She hated to be late for class, or, worse, to miss, and the term was only three weeks old; but this was Niemeyer.

  “Of course,” she said, and stepped nervously inside.

  Their footsteps echoed in the tiled hall. Learned men dead half a century glared down as they passed. “What you said to me the other day, Miss Jensen. About doing your duty if called upon. Were you serious, or was it just so much pap?”

  “I was serious.”

  “You’re very sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then,” he said, as if matters were out of his hands. She remembered the photographer, and wondered again if she had signed up for something.

  Niemeyer’s first-floor suite would have done duty for four senior professors. The teaching assistants had desks in the foyer. A prim, disapproving woman named Mrs. Khorozian guarded the inner sanctum. Her husband sold antiques out in the countryside somewhere, and campus rumor had it that the two of them were resettled spies.

  “They’re here,” said Mrs. Khorozian.

  “Excellent,” said the professor. He opened the door of his grand office, and great clouds of pipe smoke rolled out. He stood aside and allowed Margo to precede him, and that was when she noticed the two men in dark suits and narrow ties who had risen silently to their feet. One was tall and very pale, the other dark-haired and broad-shouldered.

  “These gentlemen have come from Washington, Miss Jensen. I have placed my office at their disposal. They would like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Me?” said Margo, addressing Niemeyer. “Questions about what?”

  “They will explain. Please cooperate. The safety of your country is at risk.” He saw her expression, and his own grew severe. “I am not joking, Miss Jensen, and I never exaggerate in matters of national security. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You are to answer all of their questions, fully and without hesitation.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said again, now more frightened than confused.

  The professor hesitated, and she saw, for the first time, the kindliness beneath the cynical mask. “I’ll be in the next room if you need me.”

  He left.

  III

  The taller man turned out to be from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and had the laminated credentials to prove it. His name was Stilwell, and the pugnacious set of his slim jaw told her that he was prepared to disbelieve every word out of her mouth. The broader of the two was Borkland. He represented the State Department, and his role in the drama seemed to be to smile conciliation every time his counterpart was rude.

  “You’re from New York, aren’t you?” Stilwell began, without preamble. “Born in New Rochelle, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Margo to the space between the two men. The office was dark wood and books, and large enough for this six-person conference table along with Niemeyer’s desk. Photographs along the far wall expressed the gratitude of the world’s leaders. A grandfather clock in the corner ticked far too loudly, or perhaps it was just that her senses were on high alert.

  “What year?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Stilwell had long pianist’s fingers, but when he laid his hands on the table, the fingers pointed like twin guns. “What year were you born, Miss Jensen?”

  “Um, 1943.”

  “You hesitated.”

  “I—”

  “Mother’s name?”

  “Dorothea Jensen.”

  “I meant her maiden name.”

  Borkland was smoking a short-stemmed pipe. His puffing made the air thick and heavy. Margo stifled a cough, instinct telling her to display no weakness. “My mother’s maiden name was Massey. May I ask—”

  “Father was a doctor?”

  She looked at him very straight. “He wanted to be. He died in the war.”

  Stilwell made a sound. “I meant your mother’s father, not yours.”

  “We’re just doing a job, you see,” murmured Borkland, a rare interjection. He adjusted his glasses, gave a helpless shrug. “Sorry, Miss Jensen, that’s the way it is.”

  Underneath the table, Margo had taken hold of the skin on the inside of her wrist, and was pinching it, hard, a trick she used in the classroom to keep a tremor out of her voice.

  “My mother’s father wasn’t a doctor. He was a doorman at a Manhattan hotel. He and his wife also had a store in New Rochelle.” She fought the urge to lick her lips. “My father’s father was the doctor.”

  “So your father married beneath his station, did he?” said Stilwell. “You say he wanted to be a doctor, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because it says here he drove a truck in the war.”

  Margo squeezed tighter, but this time refused to drop her eyes. She spoke the words with her grandmother’s bitterness, for Nana told the story often, and with anger. “My father was a brilliant man. He had a degree in chemical engineering. From here. He made Phi Beta Kappa. He planned to go to medical school. And because he was a Negro, the United States Army made him drive a truck.” Although she realized that she sounded snappish, retreat was not her style. “Anyway, I don’t see why this is any of your business. What’s this about?”

  Borkland, the diplomat, trampled on Stilwell’s annoyed response. “I’m afraid we’re not allowed to say, Miss Jensen. Not just yet. In a bit, after this part of the interview is over.” The smile seemed waterproof. “As Professor Niemeyer said, the nation’s security is at stake. I know that’s hard for you to accept. For the moment, I only ask you to bear with us.” With that, he put the pipe back in his mouth.

  Margo’s gaze slipped from one man to the other, before settling in the middle distance, where a younger Niemeyer, in black and white, leaned over President Truman’s shoulder, pointing to a line in a document.

  “A man followed me on campus the other day,” she said, instinct screaming not to let these cold bureaucrats master the conversation. “He pretended to be an alumnus, but he was taking pictures of me. Why?”

  The two men exchanged a questioning glan
ce: One of yours? Each shook his head slightly.

  “We wouldn’t know anything about that,” said Borkland.

  Stilwell put the point another way: “If he’d been working for us, you’d never have seen him. Probably just likes photos of pretty girls.”

  “He followed me again on Saturday—”

  “Well, he couldn’t have been much good at it if you spotted him. And now, if you’re done with the trivialities, let’s get back to the questions.”

  She continued to focus on Truman’s thoughtful mien. She supposed that there was nothing they could do if she stood up and marched out of the office, but her curiosity was aroused, as no doubt they intended. And of course there was also the matter of her not wanting to disappoint Professor Niemeyer, who had evidently singled her out for—well, for something. And if Niemeyer decided to push her career …

  “By all means,” she said.

  Stilwell wrote a couple of lines in his notebook. “Good. Back to your parents, then. Your father died in action, did he?”

  “An accident in the war. His truck crashed.” She kept her voice even. “I was ten months old. I never met him.”

  “And your mother ten years ago?”

  Squeezing harder still. “Closer to twelve. Cancer.”

  Stilwell tapped his pencil on the table, the sound very loud in her state of tautened attention. “Siblings?”

  “An older brother. Corbin. He’s married and lives in Ohio.”

  “The two of you raised by your father’s mother, is that right? Charlotte Jensen?”

  “Claudia.”

  “Quite the battle-axe, I’m told.” He turned a page. “She graduated Smith, I see. Why didn’t you follow in her footsteps, Miss Jensen? Wait. Let me guess. You’re following the footsteps of the father you never met. How dutiful.” He chuckled at her blush. “Or maybe it’s just that Smith doesn’t have boys. You’re seeing a young man now, aren’t you? This Tom Jellinek? He’s physics, you’re government. So how did you meet, if I might ask?”