CHAPTER EIGHT
The air conditioner hummed, and the resonating undertone came and went. Lewis McCain lay on the cot, staring up at the ceiling. Now that his head was clearer, isolated recollections from the hazy period following his arrest would appear suddenly in his mind in a seemingly patternless fashion. Lying here, staring up at the air-conditioner grille, was one of them. It had a gray-painted metal escutcheon surrounding it, with a scratch by one of the corner screws where a screwdriver had slipped. The sound hadn’t contained that distinctive resonance then. Something must have loosened itself in the ducting fairly recently, he thought idly.
McCain didn’t trust Russians. In his experience, whenever they started behaving reasonably, they were up to something. They’d been giving him too easy a time. Why? What were they after? From what he knew of Soviet interrogation practices, it was likely on two counts that Paula was having a tougher time: one, she was a woman, and therefore more easily intimidated, according to standard KGB thinking; and two, she would quickly have been identified as a technician rather than an intelligence professional, and hence more vulnerable through knowing less of what to expect.
So why were they playing a restrained game with him? Probably because they anticipated international ramifications and had no intention of compromising their own position by showing less-than-spotless hands. If they saw the affair as eventually being made public, they’d probably be putting pressure on Paula to make a signed statement. In his case, seeing there would be little chance of getting anywhere with a similar demand, they might simply have decided to work on convincing him that they weren’t such bad people after all, and see what accrued benefits they might be able to squeeze from the results later. Yes, he thought, nodding up at the air-conditioner grille, that would be consistent with the way they had been acting.
He thought about how he had come to find himself here at the age of thirty-six, a prisoner in a Soviet space habitat hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth.
When people asked what had induced him to make a career in military intelligence, he usually told them it was ideological: that he believed the Western way of life was worth defending. Despite its faults, a democracy based on free enterprise allowed him to be himself, to believe and say what he chose, and, apart from a few not-unreasonable constraints, made how he preferred to lead his life none of anyone else’s business. That suited him just fine. So, the answer was true as far as it went; it was the kind that people expected, and they accepted it. But there was another side to it, too, which involved more personal things.
McCain had been born in Iowa, but his mother, Julia, was Czechoslovakian. She had escaped during the anti-Russian uprising of 1968. He remembered her telling of the Czechs’ disgust over the sellout by the British and French to Hitler at Munich in 1938 of the nation which they themselves had created a mere twenty years previously and pledged solemnly to defend. Instead, at the very moment when Czechoslovakia was mobilizing to defend itself, they had surrendered it to six years of Nazi barbarism. The story had made a deep impression on the developing mind of young Lewis McCain. It had convinced him that tyrants and dictators could not be appeased. The lure of easy pickings merely excited them on to greater excesses. As with people, nations able to defend themselves, and prepared to do so if they had to, were left alone.
Julia retold stories that her parents had told her of listening around an illegal radio to reports of Hitler’s armies storming eastward, apparently overwhelming the Russians as effortlessly as they had overwhelmed the Poles. Czechoslovakia, left hundreds of miles behind the front, had surely been consumed in a nightmare that would lie across Europe for generations to come. But then the news began to change. The Russians counterattacked from the very gates of Moscow. They held at Leningrad. They stopped, then encircled and annihilated the Germans at Stalingrad. In the years that followed, the Germans were driven back remorselessly, until eventually the Red Army entered Czechoslovakia. On the day their T-34 tanks rumbled into Prague, Lewis’s grandfather had strode into the house and announced in a voice shaking with pride and emotion, “I am a Communist!” And for a while Czechoslovakia became perhaps the most faithful of the Soviets’ allies.
But the elation was short-lived. Ironically the Russians, like the Nazis before them, became oppressors of the people who had welcomed them as liberators. Instead of the independence they had promised, they imposed a Moscow-controlled puppet regime and brought in the familiar Bolshevik apparatus of ruthless persecution, midnight arrests, trumped-up charges, brutally extracted confessions, deportations, and executions to eliminate potential opposition. And, fanatically pursuing their socialist ideals, they seized land, property, and all small businesses, which henceforth were to be owned by the state.
The foundry and engineering shop that Lewis’s grandfather had worked strenuously to build up through the worst years of the thirties was taken from the family and handed over to be managed by a Party bureaucrat who had never seen a lathe or a grinding machine, had no comprehension of taking pride in excellence, and who was incapable of thinking in any terms other than of quotas. Within six months the business was ruined, and Lewis’s grandfather lost his income, which was replaced by a subsistence wage. Later, when years of anger at corruption, incompetence, and lies finally boiled over into open rebellion in the streets, he was shot in the fighting when the Red Army’s tanks returned to Prague. That was the last thing that Julia remembered seeing before she and her companions fled for the border. She ended up in Holland, where she met her first husband, an American marketing executive. They moved to the US, but the marriage didn’t work out, and Julia spent some years raising a son, Ralph, on her own before she remarried, this time to a widowed Iowa farmer of Scottish descent: Lewis’s father, Malcolm. That was in 1981, during the latter years of what had been a confused period for America.
After emerging as the most powerful among the war’s victors, the nation had gone on to enjoy two decades of growth and prosperity unprecedented by any society in history. Uninterested in the creeds and passions responsible for turning half the rest of the world into rubble, the generation that had grown up through the lean and threadbare years of the Depression turned to Sears, General Electric, General Motors, and the loan officer at the local bank for fulfillment. In their own eyes they were overcoming the problems of poverty, disease, hunger, and ignorance which had devastated human populations for as long as humanity had existed. They were proud of their achievement and of the society that had made it possible. They assumed their children would be grateful. They tried to export their system to other peoples and assumed they would be grateful, too.
Pendulums swing, however.
The next generation, watching the rest of the world’s problems on color TV over refrigerator-fresh steaks after driving home from school in air-conditioned automobiles, instead of feeling grateful, felt guilty. By some curious twist of logic it became America’s fault that the rest of the world still had problems at all. Through a sweeping extension of the “Eat-up-your-potatoes-because-the-children-in-China-are-starving” syndrome—as if, by some natural law of protein parity, every uneaten potato on a plate in Minnesota mysteriously induced the symmetric disappearance of rice from a bowl in Peking—America’s enterprise in putting its own house in order was to blame for the disorder that persisted everywhere else.
The result was a moral crusade against the American system and the institutions that gave it substance: capitalism and the business corporations, the technological industries that supported them, the science that made technology possible, and ultimately the faculty of reason itself, which was the foundation of science. The weapon was fear. Wreathed in clouds of acid rain, radiation, and carcinogens, buried under indestructible plastics, deluged with genetically mutated microbes, and stripped of its ozone, the planet would ferment in swamps of its own garbage—if the Bomb didn’t get it first or bring on a Nuclear Winter. And America had provoked the Soviets by refusing to disarm unilaterally and thereby ensure world peace—as the European democracies had ensured peace by disarming themselves unilaterally in the 1930’s.
The greater the contribution to the success of the system, the greater the guilt. It followed that, along with the chemist, the auto maker, the pharmacist, and the nuclear engineer, one of the most persecuted victims of the process should be the American farmer. He had, after all, raised productivity to a point where three percent of the population could not only feed the country better than seventy percent had been able to a century earlier, but could also export a hefty surplus—freeing lots of intellectuals to write in comfort on the evils of production and to campaign for the civil rights of the malaria virus while treating people as pollution.
Consequently, after putting up with years of harassment from inquisitorial regulators and political activists seeking to ban everything from fertilizers to farm mechanization, Malcolm sold the farm and moved the family to California, where he invested the proceeds in an agricultural-machinery business that provided a reasonable living. Throughout Lewis’s teenage years, Malcolm had continued to rage about “corporate socialism”—by which he meant the agribusiness giant that had bought the land in Iowa—as much as Julia warned against collectivism. It no more represented the spirit of America, he used to fume, than the liberal-socialist element in Washington, and had played as great a part in bringing about the economic mess and cultural negativism of the seventies.
Thus, one of Lewis’s parents was a refugee from a tyranny that had destroyed the worth of a lifetime’s labor; the other had been a victim of legalized witch-hunting in the name of ideology. Reflection on these things produced a deep sense of resentment and injustice in Lewis as a youth. He concluded that there were no such things as inalienable “natural” rights. The only rights that meant anything were those that could be defended—by custom, by law, and, if necessary, by force.
McCain graduated from UCLA at twenty-two with BA degrees in Political History and Modern Languages. These qualifications, along with his innate skepticism and desire to preserve his individuality, added up to a good grounding for work in the intelligence community. Hence, when, desperate to escape from the tedium of California farm-country life, he attended on-campus interviews for entry into the armed services, a recruiter from another department of the government pounced on him instead. So, he’d ended up back at school, this time with the UDIA at its training center in Maryland. Upon completion of the course he went to its headquarters to work as an administrative assistant, which he fondly assumed would be a cover title for more exciting and glamorous things. But the job turned out to be just what it said—clerk—and for two boring years he proved his loyalty by shuffling papers, filling in forms, sorting incoming material, and checking facts . . . and checking them again, and then rechecking them. The experience turned out to be vital to becoming an effective agent.
Since then he’d spent some years in Europe with NATO intelligence, which was followed by six months back in the US for intensive training on such things as codes and communications, observation, security, concealment and evasion, weapons and self-defense, breaking and entering, lock picking, safe cracking, wiretaps, bugs, and other noble arts. After that he’d gone back to Europe to be introduced to counterintelligence directed against Soviet espionage into NATO weaponry, and then back to the States for courses in Eastern languages and advanced Russian—he’d spoken Czech and German, which Julia and Ralph had often conversed in, since he was a boy. From there he’d been sent on a series of assignments in the Far East, beginning with a position at the US embassy in Tokyo. His last job before being recalled to Washington for the Pedestal mission was developing a network of intelligence contacts and sources in Peking. And through all of it, everything he’d seen reinforced his original conviction that the Western way wasn’t such a bad way to live. Yet there were lots of people out there who for one reason for another, real or imagined, were ready to bring the West down if they got the chance.
The key sounded in the door, and McCain sat up. It was too early for lunch. Protbornov entered, accompanied by a major called Uskayev. Behind them was a guard carrying a canvas bag. Protbornov looked around, his dark eyes moving casually beneath their heavy lids. He took a blue pack of Russian cigarettes from one of the pockets in his tunic, selected one, and almost as if it were an afterthought offered the pack to McCain. McCain shook his head. “You must be feeling almost at home here by now,” Protbornov rumbled. “Well, how would you say we have treated you? Not unfairly, I trust?”
“It could be worse,” McCain agreed neutrally.
Protbornov lit his cigarette and lifted one of the books from the shelf to inspect its title. “A pity that it requires so much to convince you that we really are not so uncivilized. You do have an extraordinarily suspicious nature, you know, Mr. Earnshaw—an impediment for a journalist, I would have thought. Your female companion thinks so, too. I’d imagine that many people you’ve met in life have said the same. Have you ever thought about that? Is it possible, do you think, that you could be wrong on some things, and that the consensus of others might have some merit?” He flipped casually through the pages of the book, and then, either accidentally or making the motion appear so, ran a finger down the edge of the back cover. From the corner of an eye McCain saw Uskayev watching him closely, and forced himself to suppress any flicker of reaction.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to be too influenced by other people’s opinions,” McCain said.
“Your Air Force scientist friend would agree with you on that,” Protbornov replied, searching McCain’s face as he spoke. “A most obstinate woman. But be that as it may, she recognizes the importance of the present situation and its relevance to world security, and she has agreed to cooperate responsibly by making a public statement of the kind we have requested.” Protbornov gestured in the air with his cigarette and shrugged indifferently. “So now you don’t matter to us so much. The only issue you need concern yourself with is your own fate. If you adopted a more reasonable attitude than the one you’ve been showing, well, anything is possible. If not . . .” he shrugged again, “what happens then will be up to the Kremlin. But as I said, it is no longer of primary importance to us.”
McCain looked at him almost contemptuously. “I expected something better than that. Don’t tell me you’re slipping.”
Protbornov seemed to have been prepared for as much. “Policy decisions are not my concern,” he said. “My job is simply to carry them out. For whatever reason, orders have come through for you to be moved to another location. You should find it more congenial—at least you will have company . . . and the opportunity for more stimulating conversations than ours tend to be.” He indicated the bag that the guard had placed on the table. “Collect your belongings. You are to be transferred immediately.”
McCain began gathering together the clothes and personal effects that he had been given. “With a personal sendoff by the general? Why so honored?”
“Why not? I feel we have come to know one another a little in the course of the past three weeks, even if your attitude has been less than candid. A common courtesy from the host to a departing guest, maybe? Or simply a way to indicate that we desire no hard feelings?”
McCain went around the partition to retrieve his toilet articles. So far the whole thing had been an exercise in testing and probing for weaknesses, to be exploited later—and probably the same with Paula, too. What for? he wondered. There was a lot more behind it all than he had unraveled so far.
“So, where to?” he asked as he came back out, closing the bag. “Earthside?”
“Nothing so exciting, I’m afraid,” Protbornov replied. The guard was holding the door open. “It’s expensive to ship people between here and Earth. Why should we pay the bill for returning one of the United State’s spies to them? They can come and collect you when the time comes—assuming, of course, that Moscow decides to let them have you back. Until then, you remain here on Tereshkova, at a place called Zamork.” A guard went ahead. Protbornov walked by McCain, with the major a pace behind, while the guard who had held the door brought up the rear.
“Oh, you mean the gulag that you’ve got up here,” McCain said. Zamork was on the edge of the town known as Novyi Kazan, and was labeled vaguely on the maps as a detention facility. “I always admired how faithful a copy this is of the Mother County.”
“Oh, don’t think of Zamork as a gulag,” Protbornov said breezily. “Times are changing. Even your Christian heaven needed somewhere to keep its dissidents.”
“I take it that means we’re unlikely to be seeing the last of each other.”
“I’m sure the Fates have it in store for us to meet again.”
“What about Paula Shelmer? Will she be moving too?”
“We have received no orders concerning her.” There was a short silence. Then Protbornov added, “However, she is in good health and spirits. I thought you might like to know.”
“Thanks.”
Ten minutes later, McCain, accompanied by two armed guards, boarded a magdrive car at a monorail terminal underneath the Security Headquarters. Soon afterward, they departed around Tereshkova’s peripheral ring, bound for the town of Novyi Kazan.