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.”
Schettler, John
Men of War (2013)
Part XII
“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.”
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:
