Читать книгу The Perestroika Effect - Cecilia Tanner - Страница 5

As Sergey got back in the car, he wondered just what Oleg was really doing out there. This was a long way to come for something he could probably have discussed over a phone call. Oleg worked for the government and one wing of the government never knew what another wing of the government was doing, and most of the time this was deliberate. Nothing was ever what it was purported to be. He could probably find out if Oleg was telling the truth.

“When I am a biddy bid rich, idle-diddle-daidle-daidle man.”

In the isolation of the drive, his mind drifted to thinking what it would be like driving this road in the ZIL with Tatiana in the seat beside him. He knew he would be a different man than the one he was now. He knew he wouldn’t be so work obsessed, thinking of nothing but security issues and the mechanism of sabotage he was taking on. Though his mind’s default was Tatiana, he knew that dwelling on the if-onlys in his life led to depression. Feeling sorry for himself, blaming himself, regretting – ah, regretting - it was the door that opened the cupboard of despair, a cupboard he had climbed into before, and fought his way out of. This was where he was and this was who he was and this he knew was what he knew to do.

Often he let himself replay the sight of Tatiana when she danced because that wasn’t a regret. He had always lost the sense that he was watching a muscle and bones person hopping around on the stage. She became magical, a flow of movements weaving a story like Yoyo Ma on the cello - cutting through to the essential beauty of the music, the essence of an expression far beyond the technical performance, so that one was no longer conscious of the instrument or bow or body of the dancer.

How wondrous to be such a performer. He never got over the awesome warmth of being enveloped in the magic as he watched her dance.

But thinking of his bride brought back the pain as it always did. Yet how could he not think about her? So many people let their miseries eat them up, making them ineffective in their lives, making them liabilities, and when he found that his anger and his grief threatened his stability, he realized he could not let that happen.

Work, lots of mind-consuming work could stave off the blackness in the cupboard – lots of work and lots of music. He reached across to the passenger seat where he had a few of Rebroff’s CDs. He got a disk out while he kept his eyes on the road, inserting it by touch into the player that he had had the car dealer install. He may have to put up with this tin can on wheels, but he couldn’t give up the music.

He loved how the songs could fill his mind, obscuring the depths of darkness. He hummed along to Kalinka Malinka, marveling that Rebroff could make such dippy lyrics about his sweet little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry sound masculine and powerful. As always, Sergey sang the words to what he was looking at and thinking about, instead of snowberries, singing “The snowflakes swirl, those white butterflies dancing, dancing spiraling twirling…” It had always made Tanya laugh at his silly lyrics sung so loudly in Sergey’s full deep voice, but he felt they were never as silly as some of Rebroff’s.

He sat back in his seat while periodically bringing a half-smoked cigarette to his mouth to draw in the flavour of the Turkish tobacco. His olive green uniform was colourless in the bucket that carried him toward the atomic plant. His overcoat lay on the passenger seat, weighed down by the combat pistol in one pocket and the hefty package on top. Sabotage and nuclear meltdown soon replaced even the idle thoughts of music.

As he neared the plant, he reached into his inside breast pocket, his hand brushing against the shoulder holster of his faithful companion, a finely crafted Makarov pistol, and pulled out a still new laminated identity card, ready to present it to the guard who followed his approach from the dark interior of the gatehouse.

Sergey Andreshev, once a colonel in the KGB at the dreaded Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow, and now the new Director of Security at the Seytchan nuclear facility, manoevred (you don’t just steer this customized bucket) toward the main gate, correcting for a loose skid coming off the main road. He was pleased to see that the big large-tread tires did give the meccano-set vehicle some control on the slippery surface. Only a few tiny ice crystals tinkled glass-like as they hit the windshield.

It was only the closing of September but winter comes in fits of low freezing and deep freezing up north there near the Arctic Circle. It’ll be a good night to be working inside the plant, he thought, since the lack of heat was the last thing to worry about in there. Unlike the 18 million persons judged to be threats to the USSR that had been sent to the freezing camps in Siberia, most to never return, today’s workers at the nuclear facility had precious heat.

The J40 rolled up to the island of light surrounding the gatehouse. The guard inside put his pencil down on the crossword he was working on and got out of his chair. He pulled on his greatcoat and came out to the car. He carried himself well and, for a big man, he was clearly unexpectedly agile. His large hands were equally versatile threading a sewing needle or choking the life out of a man. Normally, he cradled a sub-machine gun on his arm but tonight he carried a white cotton sack.

Sergey cranked down the driver’s window as the gate guard approached briefly flicking the yellow beam of his flashlight across Sergey’s features, then snapped it off. The checkpoint routine was a ritual they engaged in seriously.

“Good evening, Colonel,” said the guard amiably.

Actually, Sergey had long since been promoted up from Colonel, but he still preferred to be known by that rank. It projected just the right amount of authority.

“Hi, Yuri,” replied Sergey.

Yuri’s moustache spread as he smiled at Sergey. Sergey was clean shaven but he admired how Yuri kept the beard and moustache trim, which was not an affectation as one might expect, but simply the work of a man who liked to see things done well, an artist taking pride in even the crafting of his beard, much like his dad crafed the perfect mortis and tenon joint in a cabinet.

Sergey flashed his identity card, then reached across the seat for the package wrapped in heavy brown paper and tied with butcher string.

“Ubechek slaughtered one of the precious pigs two days ago and made fresh kolbasa. You can use some?”

“What more can a man ask for, Colonel, than a piece of pig in a package? Well, maybe fur mittens… “

Yuri reached for the package. He and his family loved good sausage and sauerkraut, and Ubechek’s kolbasa was one of the best he’d ever eaten. Who would have thought to find such sausage in the beyond of Siberia? Sergey also favoured Ubechek’s kolbasa, but gave his share to Yuri; partly because Yuri’s family loved it, and partly because Yuri had access to the best home brew vodka you could find in a week’s drive. Yuri’s neighbour, two doors over, had a big greenhouse in the back of his plot. He grew the grain there that he used to make vodka. He harvested the grain and stored it in an outbuilding at his house. Technically, the making of home brew vodka was illegal. However, in the autumn, there was hardly a house in Seytchan that didn't give off the sweet aroma of distilled mash. The vodka produced by the townspeople was used as a tonic – a daily tonic for many - and for bartering. Every spring, there was a competition to determine which was the best vodka produced that year. A certificate proclaiming the superiority of the winner's vodka was highly sought after.

Yuri discovered on his first day in the village that his vodka-neighbour loved motorcycles as did Yuri. (Most relationships started with vodka in most of Russia.) The neighbour had a vintage Ural that demanded constant tinkering and adjustments to keep it at peak performance. Yuri spent what little free time he had in his neighbour's garage working with him on the motorcycle and sipping vodka and listening for information. And so the micro economy flourished in Northern Russia, and the skin-boot telegraph communicated most of what one needed to know.

Tucking the package under his arm, Yuri said, "Thank you, Colonel. My Magda baked fresh bread today and now I have something to go with it."

He pushed the sack containing a loaf of bread and a two-liter flask of clear liquid through the window to Sergey's waiting hand. With a smile, he hurried back into the warmth of the guardhouse. He inserted his key into an electric lock on the control panel and turned it to activate the gate-opening mechanism.

Sergey waited for the large heavy gate to slide across out of the way, then eased the throbbing jeep through the opening. He saw Yuri wave and go back to his crossword puzzle as the gate closed behind him. Sergey turned the CD up a notch again.

He had been briefed on the facility and had spent his week there becoming as familiar with the layout and functioning of the plant as he was with his own kitchen. When he was fully confident, he would destroy the plans and information. No incidents had happened since he arrived but several had happened shortly before he arrived.

All that he could see conformed to the information he had been given. The four-meter high chain link fence surrounded the entire compound around the plant. The top of the fence, that sloped outward for a meter was strung with triple coils of razor wire. Probably when it was new, the zinc-coated razor wire could slice open a man like a sharp scalpel, even through the barest contact. Now, the dirty oxidized wire had the capability to infect wounds as well as inflict them.

The fence had another dangerous attribute. At random intervals, pulses of electricity energized the fence and stunned any living thing that happened to be touching it at the time. Ordinary bolt cutters could not chew into the hardened steel fence and its concrete foundation prevented tunneling under. Flood lights and television cameras were additional deterrents to trespassing, day or night.

He could trust Yuri to have checked every foot of the fence. Yuri was dependable, he was a friend, and they had meaningful history. That didn’t mean he could trust him completely, of course. Who could you trust completely? Sergey didn’t trust anyone completely, no one could. Sergey figured if you couldn’t anticipate what you yourself would do under any given circumstances, how could you possibly anticipate what a friend would do? You couldn’t, of course.

But over the last ten years, nothing Yuri had done belied Sergey’s trust – they needed each other to stay alive, and that is the best motive for trust. Once that is not there, or once a person’s life is better served by betraying another, trust was just unmapped territory full of surprises and often horror. This Sergey had learned very young and very well.

Sergey idled the Toyota just inside the gate to let the grader finish scraping the snow off the parking lot and entrance area. The snow had stopped falling, and the storm clouds were being pushed off by a cold north wind.

From checking his notes, he knew that inside the visible wire fence was a second, invisible, infrared fence composed of criss-crossing beams in the infrared spectrum that would instantly signal any interference with the fence by sounding alarms in the Security Control Centre. The beams were transmitted by compact senders mounted in the posts of the main fence and picked up by equally compact receivers, also mounted in the fence posts. Most of the time, this infrared fence was extremely effective for detecting the motion of warm bodies, whether they be men or large animals, and the threshold of sensitivity had been set to exclude nuisance penetrators like small rodents and birds and flying papers and leaves. Though it was relatively free of false alarms, it was not fully reliable in very dense fog or snowfall.

“Gori, gori, moya…” he hummed aloud as he glanced around the compound noting the fuel storage tank that lay far back in the compound near the fence. The small shed beside the tank was used to store cans of kerosene and gasoline. Rusty mining carts, some with a wheel missing or a side caved in, were strategically placed to give the impression that this was an under-producing and practically useless operation.

In the dim lighting of the outdoor flood lamps, the dingy main building looked like a huge steel shoebox. At one end, it sat solidly against the face of the mountain, and, at the other, was anchored by a stubby tower extending three floors above the flat roof. The robust steel roof trusses and steel supporting columns were covered on the interior with alloy steel mesh to limit the damaging effects of an explosion. The exterior was sheathed with galvanized corrugated iron that rusted quickly in the harsh Siberian climate. When it did rain, which was not often, the rust washed down in streaks like dirty reddish-brown tears that stained the outside walls in places where the galvanizing had thinned to nothing. A row of small windows, obscure from dust and dirt, lined up under the roofline facing the guarded perimeter gate. The only other visible openings in the building envelope was a massive steel vehicle door and beside it, a steel pedestrian door.

At such a remote outpost, the pace was unhurried as evidenced by the slow-moving grader. Sergey sat back with his cigarette and admired how the building that appeared to end at the face of the mountain, actually was connected by a tunnel and three sets of reinforced steel doors to the cave inside the mountain.

“Oh chee chorniya, oh chee strastnye, ochee zhguchie, predkrasnye..…” he bellowed, singing along with Rebroff and tapping a foot on the imagined drum.

This camouflaged operation deceived American spy satellites that orbited high above, circling the earth once every ninety minutes. Their orbits shifted over by a graduated amount on each pass so that eventually every square meter of Russian territory could be scanned if the Americans chose to do so. They did not, of course, because the cost in terms of money, resources, and manpower would be too heavy, even for them. The amount of data accumulated by constant scanning would be unmanageable. So they scanned the globe only sparsely and randomly. The data were analyzed even more randomly, then dumped if there was no apparent threat to their national security. They looked mainly for new construction and changes to previous installations. As with animals, it is movement or changes that alert the observer to possible danger.

Since the Americans only scanned Russian territory randomly, the Russians continually acquired American scanning schedules through agents and informers based in the United States. Armed with this intelligence, they merely scheduled their secret activities accordingly.

Early in the cold war, the Soviets leaked news to the West that prospectors looking for gold and diamond deposits in the Orlugen Mountains of Eastern Siberia had instead discovered a deposit of copper ore. Their objective was to conceal the real discovery of a new uranium deposit within the mountain.

But now, Sergey had a new assignment here in the land of a billion stars. Who knew how bad the project would be, but Sergey had learned to face what he didn’t like. By deliberately facing it, he found that whatever the misery was, it would lose it’s hold. If he just got on with the job he avoided hours and days of anguish dreading what he would have to end up doing anyway.

For this new mission, Sergey arrived in the rented J40 the week before, and Yuri and his family followed by bus the next morning. To put off any suspicion, they put out a simple but plausible cover story that they had recently been discharged from the army only to find that there was no housing and little chance of work for them in their new civilian life. Their former positions in the military police qualified them for security work, but not in Moscow or St. Petersburg, or any other main city. So, when they were finally offered jobs at this isolated location, they took them. A perfectly reasonable situation.

Yuri spent the week sussing out the people of the town, listening and looking and meeting the locals, and engaging in all the Russian activities; arm wrestling, drinking vodka, singing, gambling and helping with crosswords. The locals were more than happy to welcome a new character since they would have few opportunities to meet new people when winter set in.

Magda told him that she saw Katya, the visiting analyst, noting the license number of an old green and yellow Lada car parked near the shops.

“Elovach’s car. He’s the acting supervisor,” Yuri added.

This analyst, Katya, and the acting supervisor, Elovach had arrived a week apart. Coincidence? But if they knew each other before, surely, she would know the Lada was his car.

With Yuri looking after the personnel, Sergey spent the week inspecting the layout and condition of the inside of the plant, quickly learning the strengths and weaknesses of the operation. He located the uranium ore at the farthest corner of the natural cave that was much larger than Sergey had expected. At some time during the geological history of the region and the birth of the mountains, an underground river had carved out softer stone, leaving a huge granite-lined cave. Subsequently, when the mountain range was pushed further upward by movement between the Russian and North American tectonic plates, the river was cut off and the cave dried up. A small opening to the outside was the only clue to its existence.

Only a short distance away, a twenty-kilometer long lake remained as a marker to the source of the original underground river. Now, the lake was the head of a surface river, the Seytchan.

As soon as the cave had been discovered, the Soviets recognized the usefulness of constructing a special plutonium producing plant inside concealed from the satellite snooping eyes of the Americans. Weapons-grade plutonium was a very precious commodity and a vital element in building the Soviet Union's rapidly growing nuclear arsenal.

And thus was born the fake copper mining operation to hide the removal of the uranium from the mountain. It also served to conceal the construction of four nuclear reactors. The deception included a large administration and support building at the mine head and a town site for the mineworkers and their families two kilometers away.

Sergey couldn’t believe the grader operator could take this long to move the damn snow.

“Holy Mother Russia, this man is taking a long time.”

Is he deliberately delaying Sergey’s entry into the building? Is something going on?

He rolled down his window to see if he could recognize the man. Should he get out of the car and see who this incredibly inefficient grader man was? If he did, how could he get the man’s attention once out of the car? The man surely wouldn’t hear Sergey yelling at him. Good god, how far from the world was this place?

He knew that getting in a flap wouldn’t help so he rolled the window back up and drifted back to reviewing the plant operation, a familiarity that was necessary to his survival. Although thousands of plants across the country were abandoned or struggling for funds, funding for regular maintenance here continued because it was an electrical plant but was identified only by a general expense number. Funds were dispensed routinely and automatically by the master computer. Since the subsequent demise of iron-fisted Soviet Union order behind the Iron Curtain, few people in the government knew of the isolated plant, and nobody outside of the tiny mountain community remembered the plant or cared about its survival.

Except someone in the FSB, successor to the disbanded KGB, did care. He was Sergey’s boss, General Dmitri Visokovich Samocherny, Director of the National Nuclear Security Division and head of two thousand security agents. People both hated and respected the General; not quite like they would a notorious criminal – maybe more like an abusive father, wanting his protection but very wary of his power. At the moment, one of Samocherny’s priorities was to deter assaults on Russia's nuclear facilities by criminals and terrorists.

Samocherny had given Sergey the operation, “Shut the enrichment plant down, Sergey. If there is no enrichment, there will be no attempt to sabotage, steal, or hold for ransom any of the nuclear components, be they reactors, weapons, or stockpiles. Just keep the power plant operating for the electricity for the valley, a minor operation. We’ll keep up the pretense that it is an operating copper mine, however. ”

Nuclear reactors and fissible material storage sites were becoming lucrative targets of opportunity that he was committed to protect.

“We don’t want the kids playing with matches, Sergey,” he had cautioned.

The master computer in his Moscow headquarters contained detailed lists of every nuclear facility in Russia and in the breakaway republics. Every warhead, every reactor, every waste dump, every storage site; all were documented. Extensive personnel dossiers, arming and launching codes, weapon status reports, maintenance schedules, readiness reports; all were accurately archived in the computer. General Samocherny did not share any of this information with anyone; not with MinAtom, not with other security branches, and certainly not with the politicians.

An alert signal was raised when the General's intelligence network picked up a single careless remark about "plutonium up the hill". That chance remark had been overheard in a seedy bar in Zhigansk. His network had also learned that earlier the same day, the Director of the Seytchan nuclear station had committed suicide. He had been found in his car with a bullet in his head. His gun lay on the seat beside him. The coincidence of those two events was enough for General Samocherny to dispatch his top agents, Sergey and Yuri, to the obscure nuclear plant at Seytchan. Their mission was clear and simple; “No more fireworks on the open Russian market.”

Sergey whistled a tune as he watched the grader operator, slowly, oh so slowly move the snow around, then back up and move the grader over the same patch, evening the little mounds. He could see the scenario of the grader-man’s wife asking him why he was so late.

“I was clearing the yard at the plant.”

“It doesn’t take that long to clear a yard.”

“It does,” he would protest.

And, of course, she wouldn’t believe him. Nobody believed anybody in Russia just as they hadn’t in the USSR. In school, growing up, you learned first never to reveal what the family did. To your friends, you lied; to your teachers, you lied; to your family, you lied. And parents lied to their kids, and then, of course, the kids lied. Paranoia was the normal - suspicion, fear – because you never knew who would be stripped of their dignity, their livelihood next by some mean-minded person spreading a rumor.

Whole generations had grown up perfecting the lie.

The snow had let up and, looking around, Sergey was once more impressed with the concept of the facility. He followed the railroad tracks that began in a shallow cave beside the main cave and curved through the inner compound to the perimeter guardhouse. The vehicle gate on one side of the guardhouse and the railway gate on the other were the only official ways in or out of the plant. The tracks ran to a small marshaling yard near the town, where ore- carrying trains were assembled. An eighty-ton electric locomotive, powered by overhead high-voltage lines, pulled loaded ore cars out of the cave and over to the marshaling yard. As soon as a twenty-car train was assembled, the yellow locomotive, decorated on the front with a big red star, guided the train down to the base of the mountain. There, a vintage steam locomotive took over.

To all outward appearances, the train transported copper ore from the Seytchan mine down to Zhigansk, then the ore was moved on barges to a processing plant at Yakutsk. The empty cars returned to Zhigansk and the red star engine pulled them back up the mountain to be reloaded. But the trains rolling down the mountain carried containers full of uranium ore, camouflaged with a shallow topping of copper bearing ore. On the return trip, the apparently empty ore cars were actually fitted with shielded containers full of enriched uranium, one of the processed isotopes of natural uranium ore. The industrial complex at Yakutsk contained a copper processor and smelter, a zinc plant, and a camouflaged uranium processing plant.

The uranium isotope, U238, was used to initiate the controlled chain reaction of four nuclear reactors concealed within the mountain.

Sergey had to admire how everything appeared to bear out the copper mining deception. Any other national would be convinced that this was just another ordinary mining operation and quit scanning the area altogether as the Americans had, relying on their obsessive trust in their high technology.

When the small uranium-ore pocket had been exhausted, the mining operation was stopped and the miners left the area. They either did not know of or did not want to know of the construction going on in the main cave. At the very beginning, it had been sealed off from the mining operation by a ten-foot thick concrete wall. All of the material and equipment needed for building the reactors and their containment chambers were brought up disguised as mining equipment.

To maintain secrecy, the team that built and operated the reactor avoided mixing with the miners and even had their own closed community in one quarter of the town. If by chance any of the miners did learn of the reactor construction, it was worth their freedom and their families' well-being to talk about it anywhere, not even in their kitchens.

They all understood the maxim, “Treachery, thy name is Russian.”

Finally, the grader operator gave a short blast of his horn to signal Sergey that he was finished and another little bleep-bleep to thank him for waiting. Sergey flung the brown butt of yet another cigarette out the top edge of the partly opened window into the snow and drove on into the yard.

He drove through the newly cleared parking area to the big steel vehicle door, got out of his warm vehicle, instantly feeling the needle sharp blast of cold outside air, and hurried over to the door. He swiped his access card past an electronic card reader mounted on the doorframe. Somewhere inside, an electric motor whined into action and the big steel door started to roll aside on heavy rails. By the time Sergey was back in the driver's seat, the door was sufficiently open for him to drive in. He parked in a high-ceilinged concrete room that was big enough to accommodate a double tandem truck and trailer. Leaving his car, he hurried back to the door, squinting against the blast of Arctic air blowing in from the outside. He swiped his card across a card reader and the big steel door rolled shut.

As he left the interlock port, one of the locks seemed to stick. That would have to be fixed. He noted it in his pocket planner.

All of the secure doors in the plant, the access portals into restricted areas, were equipped with the newer proximity card readers that scanned encoded plastic cards and instantly read the data stored there. Each person's card included vital statistics: name, security classification, height, weight, colour of hair, colour of eyes, clearance number and so on. With Russian thoroughness, sexual orientation was surprisingly not included. A digital file containing their image was also encoded on the card. The card reader transmitted the scanned information to the Security Control Centre on the third floor where a dedicated computer compared the incoming data with its internally stored data. If they matched, the computer commanded the electric latch at the door to operate, allowing entry. Shortly after a preset interval, the computer commanded the door latch to lock again. Any unusual condition, like an invalid card or a door propped open, immediately raised an alarm, requiring a security officer to investigate and restore normal status.

“All day long I’d bidi bidi bum…(hum, hum)”

The computer, mounted in a steel equipment cabinet, was big and it was reliable. It functioned flawlessly day after day and night after night. It was an old computer, filled with printed circuit cards full of transistors; old technology, but very dependable.

The style of technology went back a long way.

He had just been reading a “slim volume” on the old days of the rocket age. Magda teased him about his “slim volumes” and his “fat tomes”, reading one or the other according to his moods. This one was a slim-volume novel with the dippy title “Love in a Lab”, but it was well researched about back in the days when Werner Von Braun was developing German rockets that could reach England. There were twenty Soviet undercover agents working side-by-side with Von Braun's elite scientists. They were there, undetected, for years while they secretly photographed every page of documentation and every mechanical prototype. The photographs, reduced to tiny micro-dots, were smuggled out to Soviet laboratories.

At the end of the WW2, the Americans, with typical overkill, rushed into Peenemunde and hauled away trainloads of papers, machinery, rocket fuel, rocket casings, and even the lathes and presses used to turn out the parts. They scurried out with everything, even Von Braun himself, before the Soviet troops arrived on the scene. Meanwhile, the Soviets had already been working on their own rocket science starting with the spy material smuggled out earlier.

As a result of independent research, not constrained by German development problems, the Soviet Union beat the Americans in every early space achievement; the first man-made object sent into orbit around the earth, the first dog in space, the first man in space, the first woman in space, the first space walk, and many others. The computers used by the Germans to track and control their rockets were models for computers developed in the Soviet Union's space program. The computer in the corner, controlling access and movement throughout the Seytchan nuclear plant, was patterned after a Peenemunde computer.

Early on, the use of American technology was considered for the Soviet space program. Undercover agents in America, including some who held management positions in prestigious computer companies, had transmitted all the secrets necessary to replicate the American equipment. But the Soviets thought the American technology to be too intricate and too susceptible to failure; more appropriate to flash and glitter than to solid performance. Instead, Soviet technology followed what they found to be the superior German and French technologies.