by James Philip
Cathedral style: Gothic revival.
The whole cathedral was erected to be a massive reminder to anti-Irish and anti-Catholic parts of the Boston population, that neither the Irish or the Catholic church were going anywhere!
More bullet points: the construction utilised bricks recovered from a burned down Ursuline convent, destroyed by a Protestant mob in the 1834 Charlestown riots.
And something for the real architecture buffs: Keely originally planned a western spire which was never built.
Lastly, when it was consecrated: it was the biggest cathedral in New England, as defined by its size (360 feet long, 90 feet wide capable of easily accommodating at least two thousand worshippers at a sitting).
Dan was currently working on similar ‘information sheets’ on practically every significant town and hamlet in the 4th Congressional District, a task which involved many blissful hours trawling through the archives of the various buildings of the Boston Municipal Library estate, and long, intriguing follow-up telephone conversations, and convivial house visits to prominent local Democrats.
After over three years racing not to fall off the frantic Capitol Hill and Supreme Court treadmill, trying to support and to keep up with the Chief Justice, notwithstanding the chaos of the move back to Cambridge, Dan felt as if he was on holiday. Even more remarkable, although she had not said as much yet, he suspected that Gretchen, back in control again, was re-finding her own formidable equilibrium. Weirdly, in the last year there had been times when his wife had seemed a little in awe of his father; as if she was somehow on trial and worried that she would, in some way, disappoint him.
That was ridiculous, his Pa, and his Mom, had told Dan many times how grateful they were for all the hard, behind the scenes work Gretchen had put in building a campaign team from scratch. Moreover, they freely admitted that without her they might have floundered, never got ‘connected’ with the DNC or the media in the ways only Gretchen had made possible.
‘I think your father,’ Dan’s Ma had said in a call a few days after the New Hampshire parting of the ways on the primary trail, ‘and me, I suppose, need somebody who will stand up to us, tell us when we’re being dumb, and Gretchen couldn’t bring herself to do that, bless her.’
Dan did not think that was it.
No, it was more than that, or rather, it was just not that simple.
He had known that Gretchen was always going to go into politics. If she had wanted an easy ride, she could just have worked her way up to a senior partnership with Sallis, Betancourt and Brenckmann. If that was ever what she wanted, that was, which it was not. She had taken on controversial cases; defending the crazies captured during the Battle of Washington, fighting the cases of Civil Rights activists framed (probably) by the FBI for the ACLU, and working pro bono for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Perhaps, most controversially, she had been Miranda Sullivan’s attorney at the height of the original Warwick Hotel Scandal, and defiantly, ever since.
Defending those maniacs responsible for rape and murder in DC had been hopeless grandstanding and she had known it from the outset, after that she had forgone the posturing, and begun to do serious lawyering. She had taken on the case of that creep Dwight Christie, briefly, and moved on as soon as a plea bargain had been struck, pragmatic to the core. She had always been in a hurry, but unaccountably in retrospect, allowed herself to get side-tracked by the idea of pulling the strings of a major political campaign.
And not been ready…
Dan was a little guilty about that.
He had not been the only party to the marriage who had had a lot to learn about politics.
Not that Gretchen would have been amenable to being reigned in when she was in full flow. Besides, he had been working twelve, sometimes fifteen-hour days most of their married life, as enthralled in his career, as she was in hers. Which, of course, was a crazy way to live. Realistically, Gretchen was always going to be like that; and thinking about it, that meant he had to be the one who found a little space in his life for them both.
He had known what he was getting into; he had no regrets.
It was as if both he and Gretchen had been looking for their true callings and now, they had found it.
And the road ahead started in the 4th Congressional District of Massachusetts.
Chapter 10
Sunday 21st April, 1968
Officers Camp, Ukrainka, Siberia
It had been a test, and judging by the fact that Red Air Force Weapons Specialist Senior Lieutenant Olga Yurievna Petrovna was lying naked in his arms, on a rug in front of the fire on the floor of his dacha billet, Andrei Kirov concluded, that he had passed the test.
Moreover, their recent coupling had been nothing whatsoever like their first, brief cold-hearted copulation. That had been an up against the wall fuck, a groping, frantic swapping of bodily fluids after which they had brushed themselves down and gone their separate ways.
However, that evening she had been wet and ready, seemingly aching for him when eventually he had plunged deep into her. At first slowly, greedily, they had enjoyed each other and then, at the climax thrashed before subsiding, their limbs inter-twined, soaking up the warmth of the fire.
“You Commissars live well, Andrei,” she had teased him.
The air crew messes at the base were Spartan, warm but basic quarters where it was hard to ever really feel at home. All bar the senior officers, captains and above, bunked together in two or three bunk or bed rooms and shared common kitchens, washrooms and meeting rooms.
The old KGB, ‘political’ section of the sprawling, now sparsely inhabited camp – mostly wood-built cabins, with a handful of brick villas for the top brass and visiting VIPs – was a world away from the normal, standard Red Air Force accommodation. Out here in the wilds of Siberia the KGB looked after its own, and treated its officers like minor princes.
That said, when Kirov had first arrived at Seryshevo, he had had to share the small dacha with a chain-smoking, hard-drinking Georgian who had a couple of years seniority on him. The oaf had never let him forget it. Fortunately, within a fortnight of his arrival, the prick had been promoted and transferred to Komsomolsk-on-Amur because ‘there was not enough work for two Political Officers to do at Seryshevo!’
“He had better Party connections than me,” Kirov had confided to his lover, explaining the other man’s departure.
Olga had giggled.
Neither of them had drunk that much.
The other members of the crew of the Amerikanskaya Mechta had drunk enough to sink a battleship and after a while, got so inebriated that they had given up chiding them for back-sliding.
It had been a private party, organised in one of the other, mothballed dachas. Red Air Force men and women did not like to be seen drinking in public with the local commissar! Not that having a private party was such a big problem these days; there might still be several hundred people stationed at the base but the survivors tended to be cliquish, mix only with their own and with large areas of the huge complex in effect, shut down and deserted, privacy was hardly at a premium, given a little forward planning.
There was Olga, one other woman, and eight men in the crew of the Amerikanskaya Mechta, one regular having recently been invalided off the flight roster onto ground duties, meaning that his designated ‘reserve’ backup crew man as also automatically stripped from ‘the team’ as part of some new, ludicrous rationalisation scheme. Apparently, the two lost man had been the most junior, least experienced, least professionally accomplished members of the crew. Had two Raduga Rh-20 cruise missiles not been left behind at Seryshevo, three, possibly four of the remaining crew members – like Olga, responsible for the operational readiness, and airborne deployment of the supersonic flying bombs - would also have been redeployed.
However, for the moment the crew of the Amerikanskaya Mechta were a band of brothers, and sisters, the nearest thing to a family anybody at Seryshevo had these days. Oddly, Andr
ei had discovered that like in all families, the bonds that bound them all together were old-fashioned ones; duty, patriotism, and a yearning to claw back everything that had been lost. Towards the women in the crew the men were platonic, almost fiercely so, and yet they were all - with the exception of the aircraft commander, the fatherly, forty-two-year-old Major Dmitry Akimov – ‘boys’ together, drinking together, and now and then, picking fights together.
Akimov’s bomber had been only one of two of the 182nd’s nine Tu-95Ks to return from missions against the British Isles in October 1962, succeeding in launching a Kh-20 missile over the Norwegian Sea. Later, he had flown carpet-bombing raids against Red Dawn insurgents in Rumania and the Balkans in the spring of 1964, and bombing and reconnaissance operations over Iran and Iraq in the summer of that dreadful year of humiliations and defeats.
‘Now all those gutless bastards in Sverdlovsk will let us do is fly unarmed ‘watch’ missions over the Pacific, and slap our wrists if we stray so much as a millimetre into Chinese airspace. As if the fucking Maoists even know we exist!’
Akimov was a lanky, prematurely aged man whose whole world had shrunk down to his aircraft and his crew. Like all the others, he had no other family. But then Seryshevo was the place were the Red Air Force, not knowing what else to do with them, seemed to send many of its lost and most forlorn souls. His sad, placid grey eyes viewed the others, and that day at least, the KGB man with a strange, guarded wistfulness.
‘It is all falling apart, Comrade Commissar,’ he had observed, without rancour. ‘Tell me I am wrong, if you must. That is your duty, perhaps. But you and I and my American Dreamers would not be drinking together tonight, if we were still living in the same country we lived in before the war over Cuba.’ He had flicked a thoughtful glance at Olga. ‘And if our esteemed Weapons Specialist had not vouched for you, none of us would give you the time of day.’
Not all the others were as reconciled to drinking with the enemy as Akimov, or Olga but the KGB man did not need to be an emeritus professor of psychology to recognise that after Dmitry Akimov, she was the steely heart of the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s band of outcasts.
No, not outcasts.
Exiles.
The Cuban War had torn the Motherland apart and it was not going to be put back together again in their lifetimes. To be stationed out here, thousands of kilometres from what to them all was the real Russia, four thousand kilometres east of Sverdlovsk, nine hundred from Vladivostok, six hundred from Komsomolsk, they were cast adrift in the vastness of the Asiatic Far East of Siberia, less than ten minutes flying time to the Chinese border. In past times they might have been like all-powerful princes; these days they were like those ancient Romans shivering on that great wall of their’s in the north of the British Isles, at their backs the Pax Romana, on the other barbarian anarchy.
That was another irony, a KGB man like Andrei Kirov, whose basic training had included acquiring a rudimentary command of English – since that was the language of the USSR’s primary enemies – understood, or thought he did, the motivations and the history of the British Empire and the post Second War Pax Americana better than he did that of his one-time fellow Marxist-Leninist brothers in arms, the Chinese.
The Amerikanskaya Mechta’s second pilot was Senior Lieutenant Yevgeny Novak, a thirty-three-year-old Ukrainian, whose family had moved to the Kiev district after 1945. Like Akimov he was a tall, gangling man; apparently, that was a big advantage flying a Tu-95, with its late 1940s and early 1950s avionics and sluggish response to the controls. There were servos and hydraulics a-plenty to help manipulate the aircraft’s control surfaces but, apparently, they did not always work. Especially lately, when the crew had had to become ‘spare engineers’ to keep the Regiment’s remaining aircraft in the air.
It always used to be said that the further one travelled from a big city or town into the steppe, or out into the Siberian taiga, the weaker the grip of the Party, and the less relevant the dialectic became. If it had not been for the sprawling archipelago of the Gulag, Siberia might have been spared the wrath of the terror, and in 1962, the trial by fire and radiation of the cataclysm. Now, the surviving cities and towns might still be connected all those thousands of kilometres back to the undamaged Sverdlovsk-Chelyabinsk Military District, the nexus of the reborn USSR east of the Urals; but at places like Ukrainka-Seryshevo, the party and its military-industrial complex was hanging onto the ledge above the bottomless abyss by its finger-nails!
Next in order of strict seniority was the bomber’s Navigation Officer, a Muscovite, twenty-nine-year-old Maxim Godolets, the son of a former high-ranking Party apparatchik in the Brezhnev days – who, fortunately for his son, had fallen out of favour with that regime just before the bloodletting of July 1964 – an event which had, nevertheless, ensured Maxim had been posted to Siberia.
His mother and father had died in the winter of 1964-65, either of starvation or from one of the plagues which had swept through the Don Valley in the aftermath of the disastrous Middle Eastern and Mediterranean wars promulgated by the old men of the Brezhnev era. The best troops, every last drop of available oil, the tanks and the militias so badly needed within the Motherland had been bled south, into the mountains and stony deserts of Iraq and Iran, and the killing fields of the Balkans, Greece and Anatolia, just to hold the line while on the home front, order had broken down, society had failed and countless people – the old and the young in particular – were struck down by disease, hunger and the numberless unnecessary privations of a sorely wounded state on the very edge of collapse. Somehow, the USSR had staggered through to the spring of 1965, and in the last three years begun to recover. But everything was still fragile; for ordinary citizens practically everything that made life bearable was in short supply, or out in the wilderness, unobtainable. True, there had been no general famine in the last two winters; however, if the absence of famines that killed millions was, nowadays, the litmus test of good government in the post-Cuban War USSR, only a one-eyed, deluded Party man would have the gall to claim it was anything other than the lowest possible of bars to step over.
Technically, Olga was only the fourth most senior member of the crew.
At the time of the Cuban Missiles disaster she had only been a lowly guidance system technician with a rank equivalent to that of a junior sergeant in the Red Army or Air Force. Like many others, she had been rapidly promoted in the absence of other qualified personnel, because the dislocation of the war had stopped all training programs, and created a dearth of future instructors.
The bomber’s Flight Engineer was Technical Sergeant Marco Pevkur, thirty-two-years-old, like Kirov, a man born in the Baltic north west, outside Leningrad. He had been serving in the Crimea in October 1962, and survived being buried in the ruins of a half-collapsed building for four days.
October 1962 was the departure point for their changed lives; a common experience which fed into their loyalty, one to the other much more profoundly than it did to their fealty to shifting Party, ideological and nationalist dogmas. They might regard themselves as Russians; but the USSR had always been an uneasy amalgam of disparate races and cultures lashed into an unnatural Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with a score of languages, traditions, many of which regarded mere spoken Muscovite Russian offensive, and resented the iron hand of the Communist Party upon their ethnic, cultural and religious prerogatives. The ideological foundation of the USSR might survive as an idea, battered, possibly fatally by the vicissitudes of war, disease and famine; but whether the idea of the Soviet Union held the same meaning for a majority of the survivors was another, wholly different question.
The aircraft’s gunner was twenty-seven-year-old Sergeant Pavel Onishken. He was an Estonian, the son of a country that was politically erased by the USSR a generation ago, and wiped off the map by the Americans and their British allies in the Cuban War. No man at Seryshevo knew more about, or was remotely as expert as he, in maintaining and employing the twin Afanasev Makarov AM
-23 autocannons mounted in the tail of the Amerikanskaya Mechta.
Junior Sergeant Tatyana Zhukov – no relation to the famous Marshal of the Soviet Union, so far as she knew – the bomber’s junior radio operator and electronic countermeasures technician was, at twenty-five, the youngest member of the crew. She was an Armenian, slight of build and sallow skinned, an untalkative, watchful woman who never strayed far from the protective circle of the crew when she was off duty. Of all the crew, she remained the most suspicious of strangers, the others, probably even Olga, she would always be suspicious of Andrei Kirov, her eyes falling on his face as others had talked, uncomfortable meeting his stare.
Senior Sergeant Vitaly Koslov, the aircraft’s Radio Operator and Counter Measures Officer, was fourteen years Olga’s senior; a Great Patriotic War veteran who had re-joined the Air Force in 1965; primarily, because that was the only way to get a square meal. He had serviced ground-attack aircraft, Sturmoviks back in the 1940s, and been a farm mechanic for most of the seventeen years before the world turned upside down. He had never married, a thing most people regarded as a blessing. A balding, humourless man taunted most of his life for his short stature and slight lisp, Andrei Kirov understood that Koslov, like Tatyana Zhukov, would never be happy around a man in a KGB uniform.
Olga was in command of her own separate group of technicians, among whom she was both the unchallenged ‘boss’ by dint of rank and her expertise – which was said by the others to be ‘spookily good’ – and by sheer force of personality. Her status was all the more remarkable because all three of her direct subordinates, were men and one of them was significantly older than her.
In flight the Raduga Kh-20 missile required one crewman to monitor its physical status – that is, its attachment to the mother aircraft, fuel pressures and so forth – and another to periodically, constantly in practice, establish and re-establish communication with the missile’s guidance system.
