by James Philip
He listened attentively as the Prime Minister brought the governmental part of the day’s deliberations to a conclusion, and announced the commencement of a rare ‘political cabinet’.
Miriam Prior-Bramall smiled across the table to her friend.
“With your permission, I shall make myself scarce, Prime Minister,” she declared, rising to her feet, as did all the men around the table. “I’ll bid you all farewell, and wish you well with your political deliberations,” she added before gliding out of the room.
Margaret Thatcher waited until the door had closed behind Miriam. Those closest to her knew that Miriam – whom she had first encountered as part of the commune which had taken over Eton College in 1964, the purple-haired, kaftan adorned partner of a gently outlandish former London Underground train driver known by his followers as King Harold, who had talked to her of his anarcho-syndicalist dreams – had been one of the few people capable of letting light back into the black pit of her grief this time last year.
The Prime Minister collected her thoughts.
“In 1965 we stood on a national unity platform in which we placed the good of the people above politics. The people stood behind us because they knew that we, not our opponents, represented a safe pair of hands and that our principles had more to do with Christian decency and fairness than the dogmas and ideologies which had torn the world of 1962 asunder.”
She paused; her eyes lowered for a moment.
Looked up with new defiance.
“Ted Heath once said to me that it is not enough just to survive; we must work actively, all the time, to build a better, safer world for our children and the generations to come!”
Chapter 24
Tuesday 21st May, 1968
Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base, Siberia
Junior Technical Sergeant Tatyana Zhukov had reported to Special Weapons Store Number Two an hour before her duty day was scheduled to begin. Olga Petrovna had asked her to arrive early and Tatyana had not, for a moment, contemplated disappointing her boss and increasingly, these days, friend and mentor at Seryshevo.
The two women had poured evil, over-stewed black coffee into metal mugs. The filthy, steaming liquid was not coffee, or anything like it but it was hot, and bitter enough to chase away any lingering sleepy cobwebs.
“Tell me what you know about the Raduga Kh-20 air-launched-thermonuclear capable missile, Comrade Sergeant,” Olga suggested.
“I have never worked on that system, or received formal training in its electrical or mechanical aspects,” the junior woman reported. “but I am familiar with its general performance metrics,” she added, just for the sake of completeness.
“Well,” Olga declared, “you will be a lot more than just familiar with the beast when we’re finished.”
Tatyana had nodded obediently.
She was not the only one who had noticed that the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s sometimes scary Weapons Specialist, had been in a mood that for her, was best described as, sanguine over the weekend. The others put that down to the absence of her Commissar, suspecting that the monster had been imposing himself on her against her wishes.
It was no fun being a Political Officer’s mistress - or, in the parlance of the enlisted ranks, his…whore – in a hermetically sealed little world like that at the base.
However, Tatyana had guessed that Olga had stopped, if she ever had, thinking of her relationship with the bar-like KGB man as any kind of curse some time ago. For all that she was rude, savage about Major Kirov when she was drinking with the guys in the crew, that simply did not ring true.
Not now…
The last person to admit that her emotions towards her lover had changed, that expediency and subterfuge had taken a very, very distant second place to lust, and the sating of primordial yearnings she had never previously acknowledged, had been Olga Yurievna Petrovna herself.
She could not put her finger on the date, or the time, let alone the moment when she had fallen for the big man; but she had, and hopelessly, too. That had never happened to her before, she had honestly believed that sort of thing was strictly for fairy tales.
Andrei had told her about his recall to Vladivostok the moment she had walked through the door of his dacha. He had already stuffed a spare uniform into a travelling bag but his plans for an early night, ahead of a pre-dawn departure by road on the two to three day trek through the mountains and forests – involving two separate rail journeys – to the distant fortress port city, had gone out of the window when she knocked on his door.
They had not talked a lot.
Andrei had no idea if, or when he would be returning to Seryshevo. Even if he did, it would not be for at least a fortnight, or optimistically, perhaps a few days less if he could persuade somebody to fly him back.
‘I may be in trouble. Who knows?’
That was why he had kept away from her after he got the recall summons; guilt by association was intrinsic in the KGB’s warped view of humanity; so, all he could do to protect her was to pretend there was nothing between them. Departing the base without contacting her might have been interpreted as supporting evidence that she was nothing more to him than a woman he had cold-heartedly taken advantage of…
Of course, when she turned up at the dacha, clearly wanting to see him before he left for Vladivostok, that made a nonsense of any attempt to leave the impression they had no feelings, one for the other.
He had been philosophical, resigned.
‘I’ll find out what’s going on soon enough. I’ll worry about it then, I suppose.’
Given that he had fucked her – in the nicest, most ardently enthusiastic and appreciative way – positively raw, at least four times, and kissed and stroked her into a state of post coital stupor the rest of the night, it was a safe assumption that he was going to miss her.
His orders were to report to Major General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov, the new Chief of Station in the Far East, at Vladivostok Central.
In the KGB it was never good news getting an unexpected call from one’s chief.
Kryuchkov was a ‘complete bastard’ by all accounts, well connected, a confidante, it was said, if such a thing was not a contradiction in terms, of the Second Secretary of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, the Troika’s ruthless enforcer.
All things considered, Andrei had been, other than a little peeved, astonishingly nonchalant about the prospect of meeting Kryuchkov. It was almost as if he was far more preoccupied with if, or when he would see her again.
Olga had been so conflicted that at one point she had been on the verge of blurting out…everything.
The plot…
Vladimir Zakharov’s stranglehold on the conspirators…
‘If I am to be posted away from Seryshevo,’ he had put to her, hesitantly, ‘may I write to you?’
It was odd how one could get so used to being enveloped in such a bear hug, spread so wide and fucked in every desirable position as if one weighed little more than a feather, and after hardly any time at all, not feel at all used?
‘Yes, stupid!’
The guy even smiled when she was being bitchy to him!
Olga hoped that Tatyana Zhukov was blind to this; and the mess she was in underneath the brave face she was trying to put on.
The two women walked out into the deserted, cavernous bunker, empty apart from the giant, disassembled Kh-20s, stepping between the big steel jigs upon which the larger fuselage and wing sections were raised off the cold concrete floor. The first ground crew would not start arriving for at least another hour; for all Olga knew, the Number Two Store’s people had been re-tasked onto other duties that morning and they might have the place to themselves all day.
Olga fought against the undertow of her worries about Andrei Kirov; knowing she needed to do something drastic.
Now!
“Every morning,” she said, thinking to lighten the mood and put her companion at ease, if that was possible; Tatyana was a frightened little thing some days, “I half-
expect a directive to come down from the Troika for all women of child-bearing age to resign from the services and start procreating!”
Tatyana almost dropped her mug.
“Obviously,” Olga went on, “I got so badly fried back in 1962 I’m barren, so I’d get an exemption. What about you?”
The other woman’s mouth opened and shut, she looked trapped.
“I, er, I don’t…”
“I’m joking. Loosen up, Sergeant!” Olga grinned. “There aren’t any men around so we don’t have to pretend we’re hard-arsed military types.”
“Right… I don’t want to have children.”
Olga groaned inwardly, realising her attempt to bring Tatyana out of her shell had had the opposite effect.
“People must be mad to want to bring children into this world,” the other woman continued. “You hear such terrible things about babies born without…”
“The stories can’t all be true. Radiation levels aren’t that high most places. Nobody gets sick unless they get unlucky, or get sent somewhere that’s still hot.”
Tatyana shrugged at this.
“Maybe, if I found somebody I really liked. But no… I know you are different since you have been with the Commissar…”
She had not meant to say that.
She blushed, shrank away from Olga; who was in no way as angry as she suspected she ought to have been that Tatyana Zhukov had so easily brushed aside her attempts to veil her rapidly evolving feelings for the KGB man.
“No, it is a womanly thing,” the other woman murmured. “The others suspect nothing.”
“I’m not sweet on Major Kirov,” Olga protested, knowing this was not going to convince Tatyana.
But I will miss him if he does not come back…
Tatyana smiled tight-lipped.
It was time to change the subject.
“We won’t talk about men or sex anymore,” Olga decided, with a definitive shake of the head. “Before I joined the R-16 program and was posted to 33rd Guards Rocket Army at Semipalatinsk in 1961, my first posting after I passed out of Technical School at Dnepropetrovsk, was as a very junior Test Officer on the Raduga project,” she explained, waving at the nearby supersonic flying bomb carcasses. “So, the reason I wanted to talk to you this morning, was to introduce you to the beast that’s caused us so much extra work on the Amerikanskaya Mechta the last couple of weeks!”
Tatyana nodded, gravely. Although considered herself to be competent with all the on board guidance and monitoring systems associated with the Raduga Kh-20 payload; due to the compartmentalisation of Red Air Force missile-handling protocols, she had never previously been admitted into Special Weapons Store Number Two, and did not have security clearance to be standing where, right now, she was standing.
This might be ridiculous; actually, it was but it was the way the Red Air Force worked. It was also the reason why at Ukrainka-Seryshevo, the Amerikanskaya Mechta flew with a ten-man crew rather than seven or eight, the actual number required for optimal operations. Supposedly, weapons specialists needed reliefs on ultra-long missions - twelve hours or more – but that was just bullshit; the top brass just wanted anybody handling strategic weapons systems and their associated arming and guidance systems watched over all the time!
Thus, Olga was presently the only member of her small team of weapons specialists fully qualified, and able to perform all the functions required to deploy a Kh-20; each of the others was certified on this, or that procedure but only she could perform all the jobs of all the others. That might be a problem, which was why she had selected Tatyana to be her doppelganger. Partly, it was a matter of who she trusted; partly, it was a judgement call about who she could train up fast enough to be good enough, if it became necessary to advance the schedule.
That was a joke…
They had never had a hard and fast ‘schedule’. Or anything that resembled an operations plan; just a raging ache to do…something. That was what Vladimir Zakharov had identified in them, and twisted to his will, at first with comradely flattery, and then, iron determination, hints and lately, old-school intimidation.
Thinking about it now, several months on, she wondered what had happened to her idealism?
What had happened to that irrational obsession she used to call patriotism?
She was not even convinced she had ever been a Marxist; not that she had thought about it a lot in the old days. Everybody in the USSR was automatically signed up to the dialectic and if you were not, well, somebody had to clear away the rubbish, sweep the streets and unblock the sewers, and if that did not shut you up, there were always the labour camps and plenty of insane asylums willing to open their gates to you, and lock them shut at your back.
Was I always this cynical?
She tried to shrug out of her brooding.
“I wanted to make a start before this place fills up with loafers and truck mechanics scratching their cocks, smoking the shit they call tobacco at this end of the Motherland and telling each other dirty stories instead of getting on with their work!”
At last, Tatyana risked a cautious, short-lived smile.
Olga stepped over to a metre-long section of the tail plane, presently propped up on a jig with its inspection panels sprung, wedged open.
She patted the cold metal.
“Okay, you’re already certified on all the ‘in aircraft’ systems relevant to the operation of the bloody things, now meet the Raduga Kh-20. Designed by the M.I. Gurevich Bureau starting sometime around 1954, specifically to be carried, and launched by specially modified Tu-95s like our beloved K variant. The Kh-20 is one of the family of the design bureau’s cruise missiles. There is another, smaller anti-ship model, and several variants based on more advanced airframes. Some are supersonic, and the talk was around the time of the Cuban War that hypersonic, that’s Mach four and upwards, missiles were on the drawing boards. Some of the Radugas are tactical, but this one was only ever designed to carry the biggest possible bang! If you look at the layout of the Kh-20 the first thing that hits you is that it bears an uncanny resemblance to the fuselage and swept back wing configuration of both the MiG-17 and the MiG-19 fighters. Basically, those aircraft might have been aerodynamic test beds for the modified, and pilotless, high-speed flying bombs that we see, in pieces, all around us.”
Olga let this sink in, knowing she was telling the other woman things she must already know, or had worked out for herself. The time had come for her to start to learn new things, context and history that was not so well known in the Red Air Force.
Because of the blanket secrecy which shrouded absolutely everything that the High Command and its Party watchdogs – people several ranks above Andrei Kirov – other people, including many of the ones who might need to operate the fucking things, frequently ended up not knowing things that they badly needed to know.
At one level, the Politburo had started to do something about the situation by merging all the aircraft and missile design bureaus into a single organisation which reported directly to the Commander-in-Chief of the Red Air Force, and through him to his boss, Troika member and Minister of Defence, Admiral of the Fleet, Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov; which, on paper at least, overnight, had rationalised a hugely wasteful system which had, more than once, ended up with two or more bureaus – sometimes with offices located only a few kilometres apart – producing designs and building prototypes that were almost exactly the same as that being developed by a competitor.
Unfortunately, the Red Air Force, still under the command of sixty-eight-year-old Marshal of Aviation, Konstantin Andreevich Vershinin, an old Bolshevik who had commanded the 4th Air Army in the Great Patriotic War, and five years into his second spell in command of the Red Air Force in October 1962. The only way new ideas, and different ways of doing things got into his head – which might as well have been filled with cement for all the innovative, imaginative ways to he had completely failed to think up about how best to manage the drawdown of resources in the Far East �
� would probably have been to inscribe words of wisdom on tablets of stone and hammer them into his skull!
Not my problem…
“You may have heard about plans for a ground or sea-launched version of the Kh-20,” Olga explained. “So far as I know, that was all they ever were, plans. The missile was only ever envisaged as a high altitude – fifteen to twenty kilometres high - air-launched stand-off weapon. To test the concept several MiG-19s were modified for launch from one of the first two, experimental Tu-95K mother ship conversions. The first test was back in 1956, using the Lyulka AL-7F turbojet in the MiG-19 testbeds. The biggest problem was how, reliably, to spool up these engines.” She paused: “Why?”
“Why there was a problem starting the Lyulka turbojets?” Tatyana checked, hesitantly, prior to scrunching her face in concentration.
Olga nodded.
“Because up at those sorts of altitudes the engine would have been shut down for a relatively lengthy period in say, minus sixty or seventy degrees of frost, presumably, Comrade?”
“Give that woman a prize!” Olga smiled. “Persuading the power plant to start up was still a problem in 1961 when the first production Kh-20s were delivered to front line squadrons. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the first prototype Kh-20 was launched in March 1958. I think one of the problems with the whole project – I won’t list them all but most of them stem from the fact the Kh-20 is far too fucking big for a non-orbital delivery vehicle - is that what we’ve got here is a modified, granted, a radically modified, supersonic version of the old German V-1 flying bomb. The trouble is whereas the Americans designed their Regulus missile – which is the same generation of technology, give or take, as the Kh-20 - as an interim measure and installed it years before us, while they developed other, far more technologically sophisticated stand-off systems, our plan seemed to be to monkey around with the Kh-20 indefinitely, sorting out the limitations of its guidance, and remote telemetry capabilities without reference to future projects. You can bet the Yankees won’t have sat on their hands in the last five or six years like we have. So, what we’ve got is a newer, faster, more destructive version of the old V-1. It goes without saying that the inertial guidance system is a big improvement from the 1940s kit we captured from the Germans in 1945, and of course, the V-1 had no remote tracking or control capability. Nonetheless, what we have here,” again she slapped the clammy metal, “is relatively primitive. Many of the test program findings were classified but I was told over thirty percent of all test launches had failed: that is, the weapon went off course, there was a propulsion problem, the guidance system was faulty or something else terminal went wrong. The other problem was accuracy, we’re talking about one to five kilometre targeting errors, even when remote control linkages were not jammed. So, when it started coming into service in 1960 – even then we suspected that the Americans were beginning to phase out such outdated weapons - the Kh-20 was only considered viable as a strategic nuclear-armed system.”
