the nuclear-powered bombers sleeping in their concrete beds.
In the file there’s a blurry photograph of a concrete box, snapped from above by a high-flying U-2 during the autumn of ’61. Three coffin-shaped lakes, bulking dark and gloomy beneath the arctic sun; a canal heading west, deep in the Soviet heartland, surrounded by warning trefoils and armed guards. Deep waters saturated with calcium salts, concrete coffer-dams lined with gold and lead. A sleeping giant pointed at NATO, more terrifying than any nuclear weapon.
Project Koschei.
Red Square Redux Warning:
The following briefing film is classified SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM. If you do not have SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM clearance, leave the auditoriumnow and report to your unit security officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.
You have sixty seconds to comply.
Video clip:
Red Square in springtime. The sky overhead is clear and blue; there’s a little wispy cirrus at high altitude.
It forms a brilliant backdrop for flight after flight of four-engined bombers, thundering five at a time across the horizon to drop behind the Kremlin’s high walls.
Voice-over:
Red Square, the May Day parade, 1962. This is the first time that the Soviet Union has publicly displayed weapons classified GOLD JULY BOOJUM .
Here they are:
Video clip:
Later in the same day. A seemingly endless stream of armor and soldiers marches across the square, turning the air gray with diesel fumes. The trucks roll in line eight abreast, with soldiers sitting erect in the back. Behind them rumble a battalion of T-56s, their commanders standing at attention in their cupolas, saluting the stand. Jets race low and loud overhead, formations of MiG-17 fighters.
Behind the tanks sprawl a formation of four low-loaders: huge tractors towing low-slung trailers, their load beds strapped down under olive-drab tarpaulins. Whatever is under them is uneven, a bit like a loaf of bread the size of a small house. The trucks have an escort of jeep-like vehicles to either side. In the back of each, armed soldiers sit to attention.
There are big, five-pointed stars outlined in silver on each tarpaulin. Each star is surrounded by a stylized silver circle; unit insignia, perhaps, but not in the standard format for Red Army units. There’s lettering around the circles, in a strangely stylized script.
Voice-over:
These are live servitors under transient control. The vehicles towing them bear the insignia of the Second Guards Engineering Brigade, a penal construction unit based in Bokhara and used for structural engineering assignments relating to nuclear installations in the Ukraine and Azerbaijan. This is the first time that any Dresden Agreement party openly demonstrated ownership of this technology: in this instance, the conclusion we are intended to draw is that the Second Guards Engineering Brigade operates four units.
Given existing figures for the Soviet ORBAT we can then extrapolate a total task strength of two hundred and eighty-eight servitors, if this unit is typical.
Video clip:
Five huge Tu-95 Bear bombers thunder across the Moscow skies.
Voice-over:
This conclusion is questionable. For example, in 1964 a total of two hundred and forty Bear bomber passes were made over the reviewing stand in front of the Lenin Mausoleum. However, at that time technical reconnaissance assets verified that the Soviet air force had hard stand parking for only one hundred and sixty of these aircraft, and estimates of airframe production based on photographs of the extent of the Tupolev bureau’s works indicate that total production to that date was between sixty and one hundred and eighty bombers.
Further analysis of photographic evidence from the 1964 parade suggests that a single group of twenty aircraft in four formations of five made repeated passes through the same airspace, the main arc of their circuit lying outside visual observation range of Moscow. This gave rise to the erroneous capacity report of 1964, in which the first strike delivery capability of the Soviet Union was overestimated by as much as three hundred percent.
We must therefore take anything that they show us in Red Square with a pinch of salt when preparing force estimates. Quite possibly these four servitors are all they’ve got. Then again, the actual battalion strength may be considerably higher.
Still photographic sequence:
From very high altitude-possibly in orbit-an eagle’s eye view of a remote village in mountainous country. Small huts huddle together beneath a craggy outcrop; goats graze nearby.
In the second photograph, something has rolled through the village leaving a trail of devastation. The path is quite unlike the trail of damage left by an artillery bombardment: something roughly four meters wide has shaven the rocky plateau smooth, wearing it down as if with a terrible heat. A corner of a shack leans drunkenly, the other half sliced away cleanly. White bones gleam faintly in the track; no vultures descend to stabat the remains.
Voice-over:
These images were taken very recently, on successive orbital passes of a KH-11 satellite. They were timed precisely eighty-nine minutes apart. This village was the home of a principal Mujahedin leader.
Note the similar footprint to the payloads on the load beds of the trucks seen at the 1962 parade.
These indicators were present, denoting the presence of servitor units in use by Soviet forces in Afghanistan: the four meter wide gauge of the assimilation track; the total molecular breakdown of organic matter in the track; the speed of destruction. The event took less than five thousand seconds to completion, no survivors were visible, and the causative agent had already been uplifted by the time of the second orbital pass. This, despite the residents of the community being armed with DShK heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade-launchers and AK-47s. Lastly: there is no sign of the causative agent ever deviating from its course, but the entire area is depopulated. Except for excarnated residue there is no sign of human habitation.
In the presence of such unique indicators, we have no alternative but to conclude that the Soviet Union has violated the Dresden Agreement by deploying GOLD JULY BOOJUM in a combat mode in the Khyber pass. Without nuclear support, there are no grounds to believe that a NATO armored division would have fared any better than these Mujahedin…
Puzzle Palace Roger isn’t a soldier. He’s not much of a patriot, either: he signed up with the CIA after college, in the aftermath of the Church Commission hearings in the early seventies. The Company was out of the assassination business, just a bureaucratic engine rolling out National Security assessments: that was fine by Roger. Only now, five years later, he’s no longer able to roll along, casually disengaged, like a car in neutral bowling down a shallow incline toward his retirement, pension and a gold watch. He puts the file down on his desk and, with a shaking hand, pulls an illicit cigarette from the pack he keeps in his drawer.
He lights it and leans back for a moment to draw breath, force relaxation. He stares at the smoke roiling in the air beneath the merciless light until his hand stops shaking.
Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers can carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen-year-old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, can drag you awake screaming in the early hours. It’s one of a series of highly classified pieces of paper that he is summarizing for the eyes of the National Security Council and the President Elect-if his head of department and the Deputy Director CIA approve it-and here he is, having to calm his nerves with a cigarette before he turns the next page.
After a few minutes, Roger’s hand is still. He leaves his cigarette in the eagle-headed ashtray and picks up the intelligence report again. It’s a summary, itself the distillation of thousands of pages and hundreds of photographs. It’s barely twenty pages long: as of 1963, its date of preparation, the CIA knew very little about Project Koschei. Just the bare skeleton, and rumors from a highly placed spy. And their own equivalent project, of course. Lacking the Soviet lead in that particular field, the USAF fielded the silver-plated white elephants of the NB-39 project: twelve atomic-powered bombers armed with XK-Pluto, ready to tackle Project Koschei should the Soviets show signs of unsealing the bunker. Three hundred megatons of H-bombs pointed at a single target, and nobody was
