Alan and Rosa Hannay were not invited to join the Presidential family for dinner. Officially, they were attached to Peter Christopher’s ‘staff’, and ‘staff’ did not get to sit at the top table. Notwithstanding, their friends saw them off on their short walk with two escorting Marines to attend the Chief Executive.
“There are some people here from NASA,” Alan Hannay, acting as a good flag lieutenant warned his commanding officer, “visiting the President. A couple of them are going to be in on tonight’s shindig.”
Meanwhile, Rosa was checking out Maria’s hair and making a series of encouraging noises about the dress that she had eventually selected.
“This is Wernher von Braun,” the President declared, introducing Peter and Marija to the tall imposing man in his fifties who had stepped into their path. Wernher is Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center down at Huntsville, Alabama.”
The older man gave the tall young naval officer a hard, guardedly curious stare as the two men shook hands. Peter Christopher’s scrutiny was of the shocked type entirely explicable given he had just been introduced to the man who had designed and built the World’s first ballistic missile. Notwithstanding the man’s previous association with Hitler and his crowd von Braun was his childhood hero. Given that these days he moved in the circles of Prime Ministers and Presidents, encountering the World’s greatest rocket scientist ought not to have knocked him off his stride. But it did, completely knock him off his stride.
Before he was obliged to move on down the line he blurted: “My degree is in mechanical engineering and physics. I’d be honoured to visit your facility in Alabama, Mr von Braun!”
Dinner was a blur.
Peter Christopher had not expected to be seated at the President’s right hand any more than Marija had anticipated being placed at Jackie’s left hand.
“What did you talk to the President about?” Marija inquired later in a dreamy voice.
“I honestly can’t remember,” her husband confessed a little apologetically. “He spent most of the time quizzing Wernher von Braun,” who had been directly opposite the Chief Executive, for the setting had been relatively intimate with only seven guests, “about the Mercury and the Gemini Programs. I was too interested in what the Director was saying most of the time to think of anything intelligent to say for myself. How about you and the First Lady?”
Marija and Jacqueline Kennedy had had a chat about children, Marija’s career as a nurse and midwife on Malta and, extraordinarily, the life and accomplishments of mentor and friend Margo Seiffert. It seemed that the US Navy, into which Margo had been commissioned during and just after the Second World War had belatedly learned about her career and exploits in the Mediterranean and wanted to give her some kind of posthumous award. As if that was not revelatory enough, the First Lady had offered to take Marija riding in the morning; an offer Marija had turned down mainly because the idea of getting up on a horse seemed like an infallible way of making sure she fell on her face again. The First Lady had instantly apologised, thinking she had in some way offended the younger woman; giving the impression she had forgotten she had been briefed about her childhood injuries. Whereupon, Marija had sheepishly recounted her ‘falling on my face’ story about the day she had tried to run after Peter; and for several steps succeeded before her conscious mind had remembered she could not actually run, and thereafter, she had ‘fallen on my face’.
The President’s wife had laughed demurely.
“These people are not our enemies,” Marija said eventually as she and her husband ambled unhurriedly back to their chalet accompanied by the ever-present Marines. “Everything looks different from where we are now but they are not our enemies, Peter.”
“I know,” her husband said. “I know. If our people back home were over here they might understand our hosts a little better. Perhaps, you and I really can do something about building bridges while we’re here?”
Marija nodded solemnly as they reached their chalet.
Inside the door the couple kissed.
“Your bones must ache?” He whispered gently.
“A little,” she smiled shyly.
The man swept his wife up in his arms and carried her to the bed.
“No, no, no,” Marija laughed. “This time I must fold up my dress before we…”
Her voice trailed away.
“Before we do what?” Peter teased.
Marija blushed and avoided his eye.
Suddenly she giggled girlishly.
“Before we do what we do!” She exclaimed happily, pulling him down on top of her.
Chapter 40
Forty-five year old Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin followed the others down the steps to the tarmac. There was no formal welcoming committee, no cameras, nor witnesses other than the detachment of British soldiers forming a cordon around the Tupolev Tu-114 airliner which had brought the ‘delegation’ directly from Sverdlovsk. The flight west across the Urals and the blasted wastelands of the Ukraine, White Russia, Central Europe, Germany, Holland and the North Sea had been uneventful, a sullen dispiriting affair. Even as the Red Army marched to new triumphs in Iraq the Soviet government had been forced to come, cap in hand, to its enemy. Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin had sworn on the graves of his countless murdered countrymen that he would never forget this day.
Shelepin paused before clambering into the waiting car to look around at the great aircraft which had carried the delegation to England, sourly aware that only a handful of these magnificent machines had been completed before the Cuban Missiles War. Developed from the Tu-95 bomber, the Tu-114, with its swept back wings and a range of over ten thousand kilometres was the fastest propeller-driven aircraft in the World. Hundreds might have eventually been built to fill the skies had not Aviation Plant № 18 at Kuybyshev — where the aircraft was built — not been obliterated in the war. The deafening roar of the Tu-114’s four giant Kuznetsov NK-12 turbo-prop engines began to subside, and the huge, contra-rotating propellers slowed.
With a shake of the head Shelepin dropped into the luxurious back seat of the Bentley beside Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, the designated representative of the post-Cuban Missiles War ‘collective leadership’. Neither man spoke as the car picked up speed across the airfield.
Kosygin was thinking about the last time he had been sent abroad to defuse another potentially disastrous situation. That mission had been to Bucharest back in February after Krasnaya Zarya zealots had launched a — thankfully, a largely botched — nuclear first strike at the British, the Royal Navy and anybody else they could think of in the Balkans and Egypt. Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, Shelepin’s deputy, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, Kosygin and his personal scientific advisor, the country’s post-Cuban Missiles War premier surviving atomic physicist, Academician Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, had been seized by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s goons and thrown into a Securitate dungeon. He, Chuikov and Sakharov had survived shaken but otherwise in one piece, not so Andropov who had been beaten very nearly to death by his interrogators.
Andropov denied ‘breaking’ under the beatings; or more correctly, he claimed he remembered little or nothing of his experiences at the hands of Ceaușescu’s men. Nobody believed him, of course. After what he had gone through he must have ‘broken’. Fortunately, the Red Air Force had demolished Bucharest with a city killer bomb soon afterwards and the truth about Krasnaya Zarya and the smokescreen around Operation Nakazyvat had remained undiscovered until the first of Army Group South’s T-62s rolled into Azerbaijani Iran.