“Madam Prime Minister, I beg to differ.” Buchanan, volume up. “This is about Canadian honour.”
“This is all about oil, gentlemen, and nothing about honour. You’ll go in there, and there’ll be a firefight — and let’s not pretend lives won’t be lost — and the Russians will have their excuse to invade. While you’re factoring in the Russian presence, add the Yanks and Brits — Anglo-Atlantic is their shared brat. Canada will be caught in the international crossfire. I will not see our country play the helpless stooge.”
From Ottawa, a sullen silence.
“I am ordering you to abort.”
Dear Hank,
By my watch it is almost five a.m. I guess it was an airplane that awoke me, because I can still hear the drone of distant propellers to the south, over Bhashyistan.
I’ve scurried to the window but can’t see any aircraft, no lights moving in that cloudless sky. The sound is dimming, gone.
The excitement of making it to Siberia and freedom (a sort of freedom) is paling, and I’m feeling tension over what awaits our friends and rescuers camped below. Add to that the agony of waiting to get out of here, and waiting, waiting. We will be escorted to Omsk imminently, Colonel Letvinov keeps promising, then continues to ignore us.
Maxine and Ivy sleep on, but I am bundled into a quilt, staring out at the snowy barrens. They look so haunted and desolate under the silvery moon. Fires are burning in the Bhashyistan encampment. An occasional flick of a lighter below, where Russian sentries smoke and murmur.
Far away on the Siberian steppes, something else is sending darts of light — headlights, it looks like, a vehicle coming down the dusty road from Omsk.
I’ve nudged the window open, and I can hear the purr of its engine. Maybe someone has finally come to fetch us. Soon, Colonel Letvinov said. Soon. With repetition, that no longer seems a comforting word.
The vehicle has taken shape, a big black Lada, maybe a staff car … It has just rolled into the encampment, and … wow, it’s causing a huge stirring among the tents of the Bhashyistan resistance army …
Okay, a couple of men have got out of the car, and one of them is going toward the men and women pouring out of the tents. A huge commotion! A shout, repeated. “Abzal! Abzal!”
It has become a chorus. They are thronging him. “Abzal! Abzal! Abzal!”
Dear Hank (continued),
Eight a.m., a cold winter sun is rising over the snowbound eastern plains. In the tent village of the Revolutionary Front, the partisans are dipping bowls into a huge pot of, I guess, porridge. Abzal Erzhan is still moving among them, hugging, shaking the hands that are not pummelling him on the back. “Abzal! Abzal!” Where had he come from? No one is saying.
We have just returned from breakfast downstairs in the officers’ mess, where we met a very engaging journalist, Vlad Mishin. The card he gave us says he’s with Izvestia. He arrived with Abzal Erzhan, I guess, though he didn’t say so. No one will talk about Mr. Erzhan, we just get shrugs. I find his presence here a little unnerving. A hero of the resistance, and a Canadian citizen to boot, but isn’t he also an assassin?
Anyway, Mr. Mishin wants to interview Maxine, Ivy, and me, and we’re game for that, anything that will get word out that we’re alive and well. He’s the only journalist here, and seems to have privileges, talking and joking with the colonel and his staff — they’ve probably ordered him to put the right slant on this story. Cynical me …
Abzal Erzhan has just entered the palisade gate, a Kalashnikov over his shoulder, and has joined red-bearded Ruslan and Atun and Colonel Letvinov, and they’re poring over maps down there. I’ve read history. Sometimes the big powers don’t directly invade the little ones. They use surrogates. At the Bay of Pigs the surrogates got trounced.
Through the binoculars Atun left with us, I see cook fires burning in the Bhashyistan army encampment. Their efforts at trenching have been abandoned — I think they struck hardpan over there. You don’t see any civilians on the village’s streets, it’s like a ghost town. Sometimes you hear a shot, accidental or caused by nerves. If you believe Atun, it’s deserters being executed.
The air seems prickly with anticipation. I know I should get away from the window, but I can’t. It’s nerve-racking, though, what if one of those rifles sends a bullet my way? Or a missile. I have an eerie sense the Russians might not mind, they’d have their excuse to go to war, which it looks like they’re itching to do.
Hello again, darling. It’s a couple of hours later. I’ll try to relate this as plainly as possible, though I’m absolutely shaking.
First of all, there was a plane, a small one, Russian, I guess, and it flew right above us, low, over the border, and you could see the Bhashyistan soldiers scampering off, like they were under attack, but the plane only dropped leaflets, it was like a snowfall of paper.
As this was going on, Ruslan was leading about a hundred partisans south, and Atun was taking another hundred to the west, a pincer manoeuvre, said Mishin. I’d better explain. Vlad Mishin has come up to our suite to do his interviews, and we all got distracted when the plane passed over. Vlad had his own binocs (and a satellite phone, by the way), and Maxine and Ivy and I were fighting over the other pair.
So Bhashyistan officers were running about, ordering their soldiers back to their positions, and you could see them, officers and infantry, mulling over the leaflets. They’re from the Bhashyistan Revolutionary Front, Vlad said, with a picture of Abzal Erzhan and a message urging the army to put down their guns and join the resistance.
While that was going on, Abzal Erzhan led the main body of partisans straight toward the little customs houses, and as they approached, there was wild activity on the Bhashyistan side, with most of the officers piling into army trucks and speeding off.
Some of the foot soldiers followed, bounding off like jackrabbits, but most began throwing rifles into a pile, raising their arms in surrender. By this time, Abzal Erzhan’s contingent had crossed the border. Not a shot fired! They simply took over the village, and the townspeople finally emerged from their homes. You could hear their chanting from the half a mile that separates us. “Abzal! Abzal! Abzal!” Even the soldiers who’d surrendered were calling his name.
Meanwhile, Vlad Mishin has been on his satellite phone, to his editor in Moscow, relating his scoop. Somehow, the communications blackout doesn’t apply to him. He looks really pleased with himself as he concludes his call … Oh, boy, he wants to know if I’d like to call home.
The girls had finally gone to bed, and Dr. Hank Svetlikoff was contemplating the risks of doing the same, of suffering through another tormented night.
He was slow to answer the phone, fearful of what he might hear — eleven o’clock on a Monday night seemed a good time for bad news. By the time he got to it, Katie had already picked up the extension, and was screaming wildly, nonsensically.
“Who is this?” he demanded.
“Just me, dear.”
35
“How like a winter hath my absence been. What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen.’” Apt lines from a favourite sonnet, recited with rumbling brio as Arthur warmed his buttocks by the blazing phony fireplace — a break from the gratifying task of vacating his unloved tenth-floor Ottawa flat.