“Marvelous,” said Burke, trying not to let the gut-tightening fear he was feeling control his voice. Two tons of bombs might not be much to Godwin, but it was an enormous amount to him.
Godwin continued. It was as if he was delivering a lecture. “No, not marvelous at all. Frankly a rather shitty plane flown by inexperienced or unskilled pilots. Do you see they are in following groups of three? Well, that’s so they can follow the leader. Otherwise they’d get lost because they are so bloody stupid.”
As they watched, one of the bombers exploded in midair. The others began dropping their bomb loads, which Burke realized were going to impact primarily on the prison camp.
Godwin thought this amusing. “What wonderful intelligence they must have. They are killing their fellow Russians.”
“Do they know this is a prisoner camp?” Burke asked.
“I would hope so. We have notified the Red Cross and the Swiss, who are supposed to inform everyone, and there are signs on the roofs of the buildings, but that presumes the Russians can read. Poor bloody bastards.”
Burke ducked as the sound of the bombings washed over them. Good God, people were dying and he was actually seeing combat. Again, he tried to keep his voice steady. “That’s what I was going to tell you. Many of them aren’t Russians.”
“What?”
“Well, a lot of them are from other, non-Russian parts of the USSR, and many of them can’t even speak Russian. I don’t understand it.”
He explained about trying to communicate with them in Russian and receiving blank stares in return. At first he’d thought it was his American accent and maybe he was talking in an elitist way to some peasant, but he was wrong. The few Russians who were there had understood him fairly easily. The non-Russians, he finally managed to ascertain, understood only a handful of Russian words, and these basically represented commands or obscenities.
A bomb went off nearby, and they ceased talking and hugged the ground at the bottom of the trench.
They waited as the sound of the planes receded and the explosions ceased. Godwin stuck his head out of the trench. “Bloody hell! My jeep’s gone. Blown off the road, I would think. Thank God I had the foresight to bring the brandy with me.”
Yes, Burke thought. Thank God that we are alive and able to have a drink. It was occurring to him that he had been in no particular great danger, but that many others in the camp had been killed or wounded. The irony that Soviets had killed their own did not mitigate the horror of the deaths.
Godwin couldn’t find any glasses so he politely passed the bottle before taking his own liberal swallow. “So,” he said, “you don’t understand the prisoner situation.”
Burke took another swallow. “Yes. First, there is the sad fact that there are so few prisoners. Only a few thousand, as far as I can tell. I guess it’s logical since they are the ones who are attacking and would have less of an opportunity to lose manpower as captives.”
“True,” said Godwin.
“And most of them are not Russians.”
“True again.”
“Charles,” Burke said, “what, in your opinion, does that mean, if anything?”
They thought on it for a while. Then it came to them.
S OME DAYS N ATALIE H OLT was sick with worry over thoughts of what could be happening to Steve Burke. The very idea of him going into a war zone was almost ludicrous. He didn’t belong there. He belonged in a classroom. Actually, she thought with a satisfied inner smirk, he belonged in her bed, where she could take damned good care of him.
Her concern for him sometimes did affect her work at the State Department. On a couple of occasions her bosses had gently chided her about her lack of attention to affairs of state, and she had apologized sincerely. After all, it wasn’t as if she was the only staffer with a loved one in harm’s way.
Fortunately, most of her work was interesting enough to keep her distracted. There was an incredible amount of information surfacing from Russian emigres in various countries, and it needed to be reviewed. It also seemed like everyone with Russian relatives wanted to be assured that they were all right, which was impossible to determine.
Like Gromyko and the rest of the Russian diplomatic corps in the United States, Ambassador Averell Harriman and his staff were confined to the embassy grounds in Moscow and dependent upon local government to provide them with food and other necessities. Consulates had been closed in both countries and a number of Soviet citizens had been detained, as had Americans in Russia.
Detained, she knew, was a euphemism for being imprisoned. Russians were being held at American military posts and were being treated well. She wondered just how Americans who weren’t ranking diplomats were faring in Russian hands. Not all American prisoners of the Russians were military or diplomatic personnel. A number of civilian American merchant marines had been either in the port of Murmansk or so close to it that they could not turn back when the war started. They too had been interned, and she did not think they were being treated gently.
Despite the constraints, both embassies were still functioning. Ever so correctly, the respective host governments did not cut off telephone or cable links and both embassies communicated with their home countries by diplomatic pouches which were carried by neutral Finnish, Swiss, or Swedish couriers. She also knew that the U.S. embassy in Moscow communicated with its counterpart in London via shortwave radio, an advantage the Soviets in North America did not have.
Of course, everything was listened to and phones were tapped, but life still went on. She understood it was because it was hoped that the presence of diplomats on one another’s soil might someday facilitate an end to the war.
Natalie prayed that it would end before something happened to poor, dear Steve.
“Miss Holt?”
Natalie looked up to see the unwelcome presence of Special Agent Tom Haven, a stocky man in his late thirties with bad breath. He also seemed to dislike everyone in the State Department and made little secret of it. He’d been heard saying everyone in State was a queer or a Commie. Haven and others from the FBI had been reviewing everyone in her group, and it was getting on their nerves. Natalie was thankful that the problem with her mother had finally been satisfactorily resolved and she no longer had to undergo interrogations by people like Haven.
“Where’s Barnes?” he asked. Walter Barnes was her immediate supervisor.
“I haven’t the foggiest idea, Agent Haven. I don’t spend my time watching him,” she snapped.
“I mean, is he on vacation today?”
Natalie checked her watch. It was already nine o’clock and Barnes, an early starter, was very late. “No, he’s not. Have you called his apartment?”
Haven nodded. “No answer. His boyfriend doesn’t know where he is either.”
This last was said with a sneer. Barnes was a frail and middle-aged homosexual. He had gone to great lengths to try to hide that fact, but everyone knew. Nobody said a word, but he always took lunch and breaks with a young man ten years his junior from Personnel. He had been a special target of ridicule and scorn by Haven ever since the agent found out. Natalie looked away so Haven would not see the look of contempt in her eyes. Why couldn’t they let the poor man live his own life and pretend that his precious secret was intact?
“We had an appointment with him this morning, Miss Holt. We were going to go over some of his conversations with a few of his friends. There are those in the FBI who think he might have discussed some very sensitive matters with people who shouldn’t have been told about them.”
Natalie folded her hands on her lap and made sure Haven didn’t see too much of her legs. “And what would you like me to do, Agent Haven?”
“Do you know anywhere else he might be?”
“No.”
“Are you certain, Miss Holt?”