by James Philip
By the time of the coup of July 1964 which had swept away the failed Brezhnev clique, Zakharov had meekly gone along with the new guard. Anything had seemed better than the dead hand of the past.
Alexander Shelepin had seemed to bring with him a new pragmatism and, falsely, it was now apparent, the hope of a rebirth of the past and future greatness of the Motherland. Now, the Party was promoting ‘peace in our time’, with Shelepin’s protégé, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev installed in the Far East, the Party’s propaganda machine was hard at work in Siberia, shining a blinding light on the new ‘way ahead.’
Suddenly, it seemed that the Americans were no longer their enemies, merely competitors in the post-October 1962 world, with whom the New Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would seek to ‘co-exist’ rather than ‘confront’, safe in the knowledge that together, both countries would keep the ‘mad dog Chinese’ in their cage for decades to come.
Although nothing had been signed the message was loud and clear: talks with the Yankees were still going on but all would be well. The Politburo had already mandated deep cuts to what was left of the Soviet military-industrial machine. The priority was economic revival, feeding the hungry, and beginning the long, slow, generational process of reconstruction. The military had always been a vast repository of skilled labour, with a well-educated and indoctrinated officer class; and it was this rich seam of expertise and experience that the Sverdlovsk Kremlin had begun to plumb, deep to its soul.
Bases like Seryshevo – actually situated at Ukrainka, around thirty kilometres north of bomb devastated Belogorsk, and about seven from the badly damaged town of Seryshevo, from which it took its name – had already been bled white. Bomber squadrons with their huge, complex maintenance-hungry aircraft capable of deploying ‘special’ – nuclear – weapons payloads depended on regiments of technicians, and in the pre-war era had sat at the apex of pyramids of scientific-industrial resource allocations which, apparently, either no longer existed, or were too expensive to sustain, or re-build. In the future Seryshevo’s future lay as an interceptor and patrol base.
Many of Vladimir Zakharov’s most experienced men had been transferred directly to the expanding industries of the Amur Valley. In the last six months over half of the base’s total manpower establishment had transferred out, the bulk of the men and women without specific skillsets, or advanced training back to the west to work on the production lines of the new factories east of the Urals, or on the re-activated collective farms between the ruined cities of the eastern and southern Ukraine, and along the banks of the River Don and the Volga as the Shelepin Troika’s first five-year plan finally took what was left of the USSR by the throat.
Zakharov had no argument with strong government; nobody doubted Alexander Shelepin was anything other than a ‘strong man’; but a strong man who was ready and willing to piss on everything the Soviet Union had once stood for, well, that was another thing!
It ought to be possible to feed the people and to strengthen the military might of the Motherland; the two objectives were not mutually exclusive. Instead, the Sverdlovsk elite had decided that the march of Marxist-Leninism was to be halted, indefinitely, and that the international revolution was, for the time being, over. We have what we hold, and no more and for that, the USSR no longer required strategic bombers, tank armies or battleships. The Red Army was to be a home defence force, an adjunct to the police and the KGB. The Navy, the submarine fleet excepted, was to restrict its activities to coastal waters and the great rivers of the interior. Henceforth, the Red Air Force would guard the borders and the skies of the Motherland, and support the operations of Aeroflot, mainly as an internal non-military internal airline.
It was humiliating…
For the moment he had hung onto enough people to service the last Tu-95s, and to keep the base secure and, albeit nominally, to retain Seryshevo’s ‘nuclear strike’ status. Had he not been prepared to go along with the mantra of ‘rationalisation’, he would surely have been replaced, retired or arrested by now. A week ago, he had had another slap in the face. Plans to concentrate virtually all Red Air Force units in ‘Asian Siberia’ under his command: a rag-tag of depleted, dispirited squadrons flying an increasingly motley, badly-maintained variety of aircraft, had been shelved.
It seemed that 37th Air Army, whose headquarters were at Komsomolsk-on-Amur, now intended to bring in another man to command Seryshevo when, early next year most likely, it became the base for two Guards Fighter Squadrons.
The bastards at HQ did not trust an old-timer with new toys! Great Patriotic War veterans like him were viewed with suspicion by the coming men of the Red Air Force, dinosaurs it was convenient to blame for the service’s inability to defend the country in October 1962.
Thinking about it, Vladimir Zakharov could never quite put his finger on when he became, in the jargon of the Soviet state, a counter-revolutionary; or the exact moment he ceased to be a faithful, loyal cog in the broken apparatus of the war-wracked Motherland, and went rogue.
It had, he pieced together in retrospect, been a gradual process.
In the fragmentation of 1963, during that terrible first year after the cataclysm when all was chaos and the Brezhnev-Kosygin-Chuikov Troika was struggling to regain control of the wrecked USSR, Zakharov was among countless survivors who had found, or refound religion. To his mind, the only sensible thing Alexander Shelepin had done since he seized power was to ‘go easy’ on the revival of the Russian Orthodox clergy. In this dreadful new world, often, a man or a woman’s faith was all that stood between them and despair.
However, it was not his faith – a quirky thing he never knew when to trust - that had turned him against everything the new leadership proclaimed. He was no less a Marxist-Leninist because he dabbled with an ancient Russo-Byzantine incarnation of Catholicism, and unlike his leaders, he had never abandoned the struggle against the evils of capitalism. The ravages of the war were, to him, simply proof positive that the dialectic demanded that the struggle continue; not an invitation to give up the struggle. To give in now was to piss on the memories of the twenty million who had died in the Great Patriotic War, and the untold dead of the holocaust of 1962.
What had all those people died for?
Nothing?
He had looked to the church for an answer. The gods had rolled the dice, sent down terrible bolts of fire onto the earth to cleanse the sins of the world. His God was righteous, and vengeful and once he had come to this conclusion; the way ahead had been clear.
And he had known what he must do.
The crew of the Tu-95 Variant K bomber gradually picking up speed rolling down Seryshevo’s seemingly endless three-and-a-half kilometre-long main runway, had named their aircraft – unofficially - Amerikanskaya Mechta.
American dream…
But then they were Vladimir Zakharov’s boys, and girls.
Of course, not all of them knew it yet.
He had put them together: true believers still; although like many of the men and women under his command, they were not quite sure what exactly they believed in, just something that they knew their leaders had betrayed.
Two big bombs, or perhaps Yankee ICBMs had obliterated Belogorsk, a town of some fifty thousand people on the night of the Cuban Missiles War. Seryshevo had been on the edge of the blast radius of one of those bombs, most of the town had been flattened and over eight thousand people killed or injured so badly they did not survive the following winter. Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base – logically, the target of at least one of those bombs - then the home of the 106th Heavy Bomber Aviation Division operating Tu-95s had been undamaged.
Eight of the nine bombers scrambled that night had failed to return. Two aircraft had been assigned to launch Kh-20s armed with megaton-sized warheads at Oahu, the home of the US Seventh Fleet, the other aircraft on one-way missions to the North American West Coast cities of Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. Ironically, it had been one of the latter Tu-95s which ret
urned, eighteen hours after take-off, to Seryshevo.
Its missile had malfunctioned, its engine had lit off during a routine systems check four thousand kilometres out from base, and had had to be jettisoned.
Its pre-armed warhead had initiated at its set altitude of one thousand metres, over eight hundred kilometres from the nearest inhabited land.
The returning crew had been arrested.
Nobody knew what had happened to them.
They might have been heroes, or cowards, traitors but they would have been better dead than landing back at Seryshevo in the panic and paranoia of the day after the war.
The 106th, had been replaced by the 182nd Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment as long ago as November 1965. Remnants of other formations had also arrived, usually to be decommissioned and their aircraft mothballed. The last serviceable Il-28s and Tu-22s had been flown west last spring, at that time leaving just the seven, now three, operationally viable Tu-95 airframes.
Before Zakharov’s time, the base had been defended by two batteries of SS-75 surface-to-air missiles but these had been withdrawn, reassigned to other fronts and their hardened emplacements, and the ramshackle huts for their crews, were slowly being swallowed up by the forest.
A child of the Revolution, Vladimir Zakharov had been born in the small town of Volosovo, some eighty kilometres south west of Leningrad. His father had been a locomotive driver, his mother a seamstress. The purges and the terror of the late 1930s had largely passed him by. He had gone from school, aged sixteen, into a military academy and thence, to glider school – where he had made his first flight in 1937 – before, without ever making a conscious decision, joining the Red Air Force, via a well-trodden route, the Vorishilov Aero Club. He had been flying antiquated biplanes when the German’s invaded in June 1941.
Within months he was flying the heavily armoured Ilyushin II-2s – the famous mass-produced ‘Sturmovik’ – ground attack aircraft. Later in the Great Patriotic War, he flew nearly a hundred missions in MiG-3 single-engine fighters; along the way twice acclaimed a Hero of the Soviet Union. By the end of the war he commanded a fighter regiment.
Promotion had been slower post-1945, nevertheless, after graduating from the Military Academy of the General Staff in 1956, he had broken out of the circle of colonels and joined the ranks of general officers, holding a series of staff posts before, by October 1962, achieving the prestigious command of a Heavy Bomber Division. His present appointment, albeit in the context of a Red Air Force reduced to a fraction of the size of its pre-war greatness, was an insult. An acting lieutenant general in October 1962, he had been reduced to his substantive rank in 1963, and knew that there would be no further promotions, maybe not for years, and probably never.
He had been informed that he was lucky to have a command.
Contemporaries who railed against the cuts, the shame of having to dismantle what was left of the Red Air Force were quickly removed, put out to pasture these days, although rarely liquidated, for these were, after all, more ‘liberal’ times and as the Shelepin Troika liked to remind everybody: ‘The age of terror is over.’
With every day that passed, Vladimir Zakharov could feel the grip of the Party, if not the regime in Sverdlovsk, weakening.
Nobody talked about revenge.
Or of righteous retribution for what the Americans had done to the Motherland. It was as if people simply wanted to forget, to move on.
That useless bastard Gorbachev was always going on the radio talking about ‘the brave new world’ that ‘we, together are making for our children and grandchildren!’
The man’s voice made Zakharov grind his teeth in rage.
All this shit about ‘turning swords into ploughshares’ and ‘holding out the hand of friendship to our former enemies’ was, to him, complete bullshit quite apart from being an abject surrender to Uncle Sam!
The Amerikanskaya Mechta lifted leadenly into the cold Siberian air and began, very sedately, to climb up into the low, threatening overcast for her twenty-three hour reconnaissance sweep across the cold waters of the north west Pacific.
Those idiots at 37th Guards Air Army Headquarters at Komsomolsk-on-Amur were a disgrace, kow-towing to Comrade Mikhail Sergeyevich!
Anything for a quiet life!
When they ought to be doing their bloody duty!
Zakharov stared into the distance to where the forest concealed the special munitions bunkers which housed the fissile components for the 182nd Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment’s severely reduced allocation of warheads, including the remaining three-megaton H-bombs configured to ride in the presently disassembled twelve-ton Raduga Kh-20 stand-off missiles that the Regiment’s specially modified Tu-95Ks like the Amerikanskaya Mechta, were designed to carry.
It was only a matter of time before Party Secretary Gorbachev’s lobbying, persuaded those traitors in Sverdlovsk to withdraw the last of the Red Air Force’s big bombs back to one or other of the Central Special Technical Stores located beneath the Urals. Gorbachev had cited the unauthorised deployment of ICBMs in against Balkan, Italian and other Mediterranean targets in early 1964, the infamous ‘Basra incident’ when, Admiral Gorshkov, the Troika’s present number two man, had destroyed the city – and vaporised its Red Army rear guard of over fifteen hundred men - to cover the withdrawal of Soviet ground forces facing imminent defeat in Southern Iraq in July 1964, and the need to avoid provoking ‘that mad woman in England’ from starting another war!
It was defeatist, and muddled thinking.
Weakness, or the appearance of weakness only heightened the risk of the Western powers concluding that the Motherland was ripe to be finished off for good.
The raging of the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s four Kuznetsov engines fell down to earth like a receding summer storm as the bomber turned onto a north-easterly heading, unhurriedly ascending – so as to save fuel – as she flew, unseen to the human eye in the clouds, on her forlorn mission.
It was the man behind him stamping his feet in the cold that finally snapped Vladimir Zakharov out of his introspection. He realised that he had been brooding, again. That would never do, not in public. The base’s new Political Officer already thought he was a crazed throwback; still, he comforted himself with the thought that there was not a lot he, or Gorbachev’s people in Vladivostok could do about getting rid of him without making a rod for their own backs in Sverdlovsk.
The bastards could not just wish him away.
The only reason he was at Seryshevo was that six months ago he still had clout, debts of family honour to call in. So, he was safe, for a while at least; always assuming he did not make a mistake.
Zakharov former father-in-law was a Politburo member, these days. His dead wife had hated her father – he had never got to the bottom of that - and for his part, the old bastard had never really welcomed his son-in-law into the family. But blood really was thicker than water and Zakharov had relied on the fact, that these days the old fart probably viewed his daughter’s marriage, and his dead grandchildren through rose-tinted eyes. In any event, he had asked for a favour, and a month later, he had been posted to Ukrainka.
That would be the last favour he would ask for; knowing a second request would go unanswered because old Bolsheviks were like that.
His father-in-law had worked with Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, and contrived to inherit a little of his fellow Armenian, and mentor’s, influence in the re-modelled Party that Alexander Shelepin was building in the West.
In granting Zakharov his one favour, the veteran of the post-revolution civil war and arch survivor, had grudgingly offered Zakharov an insight into the way the Troika saw the world. Politically, nobody really cared what went on in the Far East of Siberia, and besides, whatever his ideological failings, First Secretary Gorbachev was regarded as an administratively safe pair of hands in Vladivostok. If he had not been, he would have been replaced long ago. Only a man trusted by the Supreme Soviet, Shelepin, could hold down what amounted to an independ
ent governorship and Comrade Mikhail Sergeyevich, was such a man.
Mikhail Gorbachev was nothing if not persistent, methodical, and very, very driven. The man had ruthlessly cut away the pre-Cuban Missiles War Party deadwood, got rid of Red Army men who wanted to tweak the Chinese tiger’s tail and made damned sure that the Navy did not make trouble with the Americans. If the Air Force had still been a serious player in Far Eastern politicking; he would have turned his attention onto it a lot sooner.
That he would turn his attention onto the Air Force, if indeed, he had not already started to do just that, was the one certainty the Commanding Officer of Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base had factored into all his plans.
Ideally, Vladimir Zakharov and the small group of men and women he had inducted into his inner circle in mid-January, would have preferred to have had a year to play with. However, at a pinch, they could achieve what they needed to do inside six months. If they were gifted more time, say, until October, that would be even better. Old school, new school, veterans like Zakharov, worked not with the time and the materiel they needed but with what they had to hand.
Zakharov sighed, and half-turned to look at the big, clumsy man who seemed to dog his every step.
Thirty-one-year-old Major Andrei Kirov, his green KGB uniform largely buried beneath his tent-like, voluminous greatcoat, met the older man’s glowering stare impassively.
The younger man was a veteran of the disastrous war in Iraq. In another era, just being associated with that crock of shit would have ended his career and possibly, seen him sent to the Gulag. Except, these days, most of the old-style labour camps were supposedly being shut down, inmates rehabilitated or left to starve in the wilderness. There were useful, and there were expendable mouths to feed and whereas, in former days, the dividing line had been drawn with cavalier indifference, nowadays, anybody who was remotely ‘useful’ was not, de facto ‘expendable’ anymore. There was too much great work to be done and never, ever enough hands to do it.
