Men of War (2013) (44 page)

“I
understand, Pavel, but what are you getting at?”

“Well
you might be somewhat upset, to say the least, if you ever did find that your
favorite books or movies and songs had changed. It would bother you to no end,
yes? And then your friends would probably convince you that you just had that
old tune wrong in your head all those years, or that you simply forgot that
part of the story in your favorite book. What is the harm, eh?” He reached for
his tea, taking a very long sip before he continued.

“Now
then, I’m afraid my research leaves me very little time for stories and movies,
but I do spend a good deal of time in books like that one.” He pointed at the
Naval Chronology. “Imagine my chagrin one day when I pick up this volume and
look up a reference I was very certain about to check on some detail—and find
that the passage no longer exists! There it was in my head, clear as a bell. I
had read it just that same afternoon. Then I go back to check on a minor detail
and it is nowhere to be found. So I check other reference books, and to my
great surprise, none of them mentions this incident. Well now you might begin
to think yourself a crazy man indeed,” he sighed.

“Gerasim…It
is one thing to find notes in a song out of order, or even to be surprised that
a character in a book you were so sure of was simply not in that favorite story
of yours. But when your
history
books start to misbehave in this manner,
then you take real notice. Yes? Then you sit up late at night with that dusty
old volume on your nightstand and you read, and read, and go to sleep hoping it
will all still be as you remembered it when you wake up the next morning. One
day you find something has changed again, and your curiosity increases, your
determination redoubles. You become a man on a mission to discover just what
may have happened to cause this impossible thing that you swear has happened.
You become a very determined man, in fact.”

Kapustin
had been listening, though he began to sense a nonsensical edge to what his
friend was telling him. He nonetheless continued nodding, without objection,
adopting the time honored forms of vranyo, the polite listening of one man as
another spins out a little lie, or a boastful exaggeration. Only when the story
was complete would it be proper to make any objection. Kamenski finished,
looking at his friend to see how he was reacting to all this.

 “You
are telling me you think the history recounted in this book has changed? What
is in your tea tonight, Pavel?”

“Ah,
yes,” said Kamenski. “That is the first thing you consider. People change their
minds all the time, but a book cannot re-write itself. It is a fixed and
certain thing—unless it gets deliberately edited and re-issued. We do that sort
of thing often enough, but then we get two books, yes? Side by side. One has
the old text, and one has the new. Yet this is not what I am speaking of. I am
talking about opening to a passage or incident in the history you know as well
as your own last name and finding it
different
, subtly changed—or worse
than that—finding it missing…and then sitting there wondering why you are the
only one who can remember it.”

“History
is a story that men write, Pavel. You know that as well as I do. I’m sorry if
you forget your books and think they have changed, but I am talking about
something more than this now—a nuclear warhead missing.
Men
missing.
Thirty six men listed as killed in action that this world never seems to have
heard of.”

“Nor
would you have ever heard about them if this Doctor had not prepared that list.
Have you considered that, Gerasim?”

“Well…
I suppose not.”

“The
Doctor made a mistake, but I cannot really blame him. How would he know that
there would be no record of any of these men? How could he check on something
like this in a few hours time with Volkov gnawing at his ankle. So he gave you
the list. But you, my friend, you are a careful man. You checked with Moscow,
and these dead men are truly dead—so dead that they were never even born.”

“You
mean there
was
a black operation, yes? This was all part of a cover up?”

“No,
Gerasim. I mean they were never born. And as for the  nuclear warhead, I
know exactly what happened to it, and it had nothing to do with the
Orel
,
nor is it on its way to the airport tonight. That was just another suggestion
to throw Volkov off the scent.”

Pavel
Kamenski was not simply a curious old man living in a quiet suburb of
Vladivostok with his daughter, grandson, cat and walnut trees. He was an old
navy man, moving from active service into the Naval Intelligence arm as well.
But his long career did not end there. He was, in fact, the recently retired
Deputy Director of the KGB, and he knew quite a bit more about
Kirov
than the his friend the Inspector General would ever know.

He
looked at Kapustin, thinking that what he was now about to say might change his
friend’s life forever. Yet there was nothing else to do at this point. Volkov
he could manage easily enough. But Kapustin was his friend of many years, and
he knew him well. He was going to keep digging in this back yard until he dug
up another bone, so he had been prepping him for this revelation for some time,
slowly sharing small pieces of the puzzle to gauge his reaction. It was time to
bring some focus to the picture. The man was Inspector General of the Russian
Navy, a lofty enough post to make allowance. Yet what will he do when I finally
pull the wax out of his ears and he, too, hears the Siren song? Will he go mad,
as other men have? We shall see. He reached for the samovar.

“Here,
Gerasim, let me warm your tea.”

Part XII

Standoff

“Very
few veterans can return to the battlefield

and
summon the moral courage to confront

what
they did as armed combatants…

they
are often incapable of facing

the
human suffering and death they inflicted…

they
see only their own ghosts.”

—
Chris Hedges

Chapter 34

The
news
whirred on, 24 hours every day, moving from story to story in staccato
tempo. The top of the hour replayed the grim warning from the Chinese general
at the UN while Fox News rattled verbal sabers in reprisal and an aging Bill
O’Reilly pronounced judgment on the story, rallying the right-leaning audience
frequenting that channel. On CNN the more liberal talking heads chatted and
speculated and trotted out ex-Army and Navy “experts” to explain what had
happened in the East China Sea, and what might be coming next…after this brief
commercial break.

In
a strange juxtaposition of the profoundly serious with the insanity of the
irrelevant, the news was quickly followed by a raft of “other news,” celebrity
showcasing, and mindless ‘entertainment.’

Wall
Street hated the war news. It was not long before the market lost a cool 1200
points, and fell another 350 points the following morning. Commentator Art
Hogan nabbed the quote of the day to explain the carnage: “This market is going
down like free beer. I would say if there had been a day when we're trying to
price in a worst-case scenario, this might be it.” Money looked for safe havens
in bonds, then fled to gold and other precious metals as it always did in times
of crisis.

When
they weren’t watching TV, Americans hit the malls and supermarkets in a spate
of quiet panic buying. Prices began to spike and shortages of many things on
the “hundred items to disappear first” list became reality. People felt the
shadow of impending war at the gas pump more than ever, then at the super
market and the cost of everything from their phone calls to their Blue Rays.
Milk was selling at over $4.50 per half gallon. Gasoline was now well over
$6.50 per gallon and still cheap compared to prices in Europe and the UK. While
millions sat with their after dinner coffee and browsed on ‘The Huffington
Post,’ the war but had already escalated in the pulsing, restless energy of the
Internet.

Half
a world and eight time zones away, Unit 61398 was also very busy that morning
in Shanghai. Operating from a plain high rise like any of a thousand others
around it in the sprawling mega-city, a select cadre of Chinese military IT and
computer specialists were now working overtime to penetrate and exploit any
weakness they could find in US defense and infrastructure networks. They
attacked the power grids, hydroelectric projects, refineries, satellite and GPS
communications networks, telecommunications and cell phone systems, air traffic
control, financial institutions, and also made pointed attacks on key defense
sites. Cyberspace and outer space were to become the first arena of
confrontation between East and West.

That
list of strategic targets was surely frightening, but most Americans first felt
the attacks when Unit 61398 did the unthinkable in a clever and yet highly
symbolic act of defiance. They took down prime time TV on a major network. The
feature movie that night was a rerun of the science fiction classic
Independence
Day
. A massive shadow had just passed over the site of the Apollo Moon
landing, and an thrumming vibration shook the landmark footprints of Neil
Armstrong in the ominous opening scene that promised “you ain’t seen nothing
yet.” The next scene showed a cyberpunk scientist scooting about on his lab
chair in the SETI listening post, somewhere in the Arizona desert. He had hold
of an odd signal that had interrupted the rock song blaring in the background:
“It’s
the end of the world as you know it…”

There
was nothing like a little widescreen mayhem and total destruction to make the
home audience forget their troubles. The ex- summer blockbuster was to be
followed by something even more spectacular:
2012,
the mother of all
disaster movies by this same director. Soon the massive alien ships of
Independence
Day
entered the atmosphere and made their way to designated rendezvous
points over major world cities. Jeff Goldblum was fussing over misplaced
aluminum cans in his role as the genius cable repair guy. He would soon figure
the whole thing out, and then rush off to the White House with his Apple
PowerBook to warn the president of the impending attack.

The
first half was a fabulous mix of awesome special effects as the alien ships
appeared and then fired their death rays to begin the extermination of the
human race. Scenes of chaos and destruction would abound, then the Air Force
would launch a feeble counterattack. The alien force fields were impervious to
all our weapons, even nuclear bombs. But the creatures in the ships had not
reckoned on Jeff Goldblum and his Macintosh. The hero would write a computer
virus and use a Roswell UFO to deliver it to the alien mother ship.

 Meanwhile,
the President himself would lead the next attack, aided by a drunken ex-crop
duster as his wingman. The computer virus would foil the alien force fields,
allowing the crop duster to get through to deliver the attack on one of the
alien ships—payback for all the molestation he endured as an abductee earlier
in life. The clear message: Americans never lose, not even when they’re up
against aliens in UFOs. Americans have guys like Jeff Goldblum and drunk crop
dusters always lurking in the background and ready to save the world at a
moment’s notice.

So
while the ships and subs of seven nations slipped quietly from their berths in
the Pacific, Americans turned their attention to the 50-inch plasma on the
walls above their fireplaces, oblivious. The first segment was over and they
were sitting through another commercial break learning more than they ever
wanted to know about fashion crazes, facial cream,
Cialis
,
and the impending baseball playoffs.

In
spite of the crisis, it was amazing how little real information ever came over
the mass media. Besides, the aliens were blowing New York and Washington DC all
to hell just after the commercial break, so the thought of $6 or $7 for gas and
a little more on the heating bill this winter wouldn’t really matter as they
watched the President of the United States ask the alien in the Roswell
facility what they wanted us to do. When the movie resumed the captured alien
mouthed the reply, spoken through the hapless character actor Brent
Spiner
, aka “Data” from the popular
Star Trek
series. It was one simple word, spoken in a long, rasping reprisal:
“Die…”
and
a
hell of a way to open negotiations. It was fortunate the nation had
Jeff Goldblum on the job this time.

Then
the movie feed itself was interrupted, with a rarely seen message frozen on the
screen.

 
“We
are experiencing technical difficulties—Please Stand By”

* * *

That
same morning the
thin cord of sanity that stretched between Seoul
and Pyongyang for long decades of uneasy peace was suddenly terminated when the
daily test of the ‘Red Cross Hotline’ failed. Colonel Sun
Yun
Kim stood holding the receiver to his ear listening to the line ring and ring,
with no answer, until it eventually dissolved into the long heartless buzz of
an empty dial tone. He reset the receiver and keyed the system to try again,
only this time the line was completely dead.

The
last time this had happened had been the early morning hours of March 11, 2012
when North Korea used the incident to protest military maneuver in the south
and UN sanctions aimed at inhibiting its nuclear program. The two countries had
no formal diplomatic relations since the tentative truce was signed in the
1950s and technically existed in a  suspended state of war. It was no
wonder, given the situation in the  Pacific, that the border “truce
village” of Panmunjom was more than edgy that morning.