They went into another area of the city. Johnny waited overnight with a stranger of a higher rank in the cab of one of the trucks. At midnight an unknown man walked up to the window and asked him for a cigarette and a light. As much as Johnny wanted to give it to him, he had to refuse. He told the man that soon he would be able to buy a packet and lighter from a shop in the west and have them for himself. He saw the man’s face light up with the thrill of the prospects of unknown potentials. He had only before dreamt in secret of such a liberty. He thanked him and walked away. At three am. a call came in to the cab’s radio telephone and work began again.
The other man took a pencil and paper and wrote sums. He discussed with Johnny the statistical successes of trajectory. They calculated timing tracking aim accuracy and location. Johnny had to discern what the object of discussion was. The example of the arithmetic showed sums of ninety-five and ninety-six percent accuracy. When Johnny asked what the sums represented, the man shouted at him. He called him a fool and that he shouldn’t be there in the truck with him and that he should not be in senior command.
Johnny had not expected to be doing the arithmetic and radio relay discussion there at that time. Everything he was doing there in eastern Europe was a big risk for him. He had gone in there knowing nothing about the situations which he would get into. He was in one of those situations now. He also had known nothing about being in senior command and he knew that he wasn’t. Though he could not see the stripes on the other man’s shirt shoulder sleeve beneath his overcoat.
In the Falklands eight years previous he had calculated a flight and drop to sink a ship with. He used this experience for the discussion they were now having. Though those previous calculations were not necessary to repeat. He received a reply to his question about the purpose of the sums. The Major told him that it was to subvert Russia’s inevitable missile strike. This was to happen against the United States in a rapid time. Moscow had given Washington an ultimatum. The army was to delay the strike. The sums represented the United States’ strategic defence missile intelligence system’s efficiency.
The major officer spoke to the recipients on the radio. He said that the chances of accuracy were not high enough. That they must improve to ninety-nine point nine recurring proportions of accuracy. Otherwise the planned missile fire would lead to an assured destruction. He told the recipients to use all the mathematicians of the USA. to improve the satellites’ efficiency. They discussed an astronaut launch. He insisted that astronauts must work on this project. He received reassurance that a shuttle launch was in progress with that intention.
Johnny could hardly believe the astronomical risks that the discussion suggested. He wondered how he could ever cover himself in the law. If ever he returned home after this operation. Piracy with great risk was being practiced. He decided that silence was the best policy. That every operative wouldn't speak about doing this. Once done, never admit. Now that he had learnt about the ultimatum, his life changed. The knowledge expelled him to anonymity.
The night with the senior ranking front line officer passed and they slept in the truck during the day. Come the following night he had another job to do. He was to reclaim rifles and meet other soldiers in a place in the city. He received a description of their locations. He set off by himself into communist Prague during the time of glasnost. The air was thick with pollution. It hung on the street. It was the litter of chemical runoff from heavy industrialization. He waded through the black amorphous gel of a million factories.
An allied plane passed overhead. A figure landed on the pavement near him. He went to her and saw that she was a paratrooper. She had jumped from the plane when it was too low and had not had time to unfurl her chute. In her helmet and uniform she was lying unconscious facing up. He saw Mia's face. He prepared a syringe of adrenaline solution to revive her. He wrapped her left sleeve around her arm above her elbow to administer the injection. He thought that she looked familiar, like a dear friend he had known back home in previous years. She was a thin young woman with one glass eye. When she came around they exchanged call signs and agreed that they would form a small team to find the rifles. She seemed to have no personal recognition of him. They started on foot to the location he knew and used her skill to pick the lock on the bolted door of the storage room.
There were no alarms on the door or inside the room. This allowed them a convenient amount of time to complete the assignment. Once they lifted the bar they entered. Inside they identified the rifles in the racks there as American Issue M-16’s and M-60’s. They could only assume that these were the Soviet spoils of war from previous captives. Then he and Mia separated, and he did not meet her again until they were both returned home in their capital city. She had to reclaim the rifles for a platoon who was landing, and he had a place to reconnoitre with another team.
The English trucks were three miles away. He followed up their progress along the tire track marks in the pollution on the roads.
As he set off and was about to start running, he passed a single man in the night, and the image of him stayed in his mind. He was tall and wearing a grey overcoat with collar turned up high around his neck, and had a hat with a brim on. Over half his face he wore a cotton bandana which covered his mouth and nose, and the visible skin was ashen and wan. The man said something to Johnny in his own language. The translation of the statement was never achieved. The encounter made Johnny think of the society he was in as a place of great secrecy and little freedom. A place where every activity must hide from sight. Darkness and corners served as a guard against appropriation. Here still the government claimed ownership and the prerogative of instruction. The man appeared to be lurking in the night in his own neighbourhood. He likely did not want notice. But the soldier did not have assignment to converse.
He moved from one area of the city to another, following the trail in the black chemical soot. Along the way a set of bicycle tracks merged with the truck tracks. Another marine waited for him at a channel of alleyways. Their uniforms were the same and there Johnny collected his new orders. They had two hours to wait before a delivery of equipment arrived to them where they were waiting. While that time passed they found another cheap street level brothel. The door was within the alleys of the ghetto. The walls of it decorated in dark red paint.
Johnny walked a flight of stairs up three levels. The rooms were accessible off the stairwell. He saw men lying with women on mattresses. He heard them talking in his language about the English and knew that he was in the right place amongst friends. At the top level a woman let him into her room. He spent a while with her before dressing again and going to the bicycle at the bottom of the stairs.
She demanded money but this time around Johnny refused to pay. He used an excuse. He said that she was practicing her natural work in the tradition of her country. So she should pay him for the privilege of employment and pleasure. He took the bicycle to the place where the delivery of equipment waited.
A small group of shaven headed soviet soldiers stood on a ridge top road in the ghetto. The tallest of them ordered them to fit backpacks with tanks and exhausts on their backs and wear gas masks. They walked through the valley of streets in the dark of night. Gas leaked out through the exhausts into the sultry air. Each man walked a different street and so they covered the entire valley with fumes.
When Johnny reached the far side of the valley he followed the second, stranger part of his order. A bucket of urine was at the latrine pipe by a house wall. As advised, he lifted the gas mask and drank the piss from the bucket. This was part of a method for biological chemical protection from the poison spread in the air. It made him feel sleepy. There he met the same Englishman who had shown him to the brothel on the first side of the valley. They waited on the hillside until daylight.
Here war torn Johnny became dysfunctional from expected military discipline. Following orders removed the variety of any personal interests. It debased the serviceman to an immoral tool and a chattel. He went to a wooden building raised high on a level above the hill beneath it. Taking his knife, he entered to the front room and carved into the wall a sign. He cut a magen star of David, the Hebrew double inverted triangle diagram. It was then that a group of people entered the building and saw what he was doing. He said that he was there on military business and walked away. The graffiti he had put on the wall remained to irk the occupants of the house. From amongst the people who had met him there, there was a woman whom he had met before. She was one of the crowd he had ushered into a safe area in the inner city streets of est Berlin. She was a talkative and happy lady with ginger hair and freckles. She wore an orange cotton shirt and dress over white trousers.
He walked about the city all day. At night fall he came to a stone building with a tile courtyard which contained a classical statue of a woman. The building was a place for meetings, called the Luxembourg cathedral. The statue commemorated a famous socialist author. The city's black grime pollution smeared the whole place except for the statue. The statue was clean. A dozen men and a dozen women met there and sat in simple steel and wood classroom type chairs. He had strayed into a session of the area council’s civic management meeting. He listened and watched to discern a translation. He found that he could get a good grasp at understanding what they were saying.
The year was nineteen eighty-nine and the borough was nearing the end of its current five-year plan. They were busy identifying the policy for the next one. Their thinking adjusted for the time of perestroika. A focus on monetary accounts for the next three years. Then to look at the world which was being opened up to them. The subject of a future religion was in discussion. This was by history a banned subject. A consensus met that that would be Orthodox if it was at all necessary. They agreed that this was to be a secret moot. Political themes must change enough for religion to be considerable.
The clothes which the people of eastern Europe wore had a conservative design. Black suits of tweed worn with fedora hats. Trousers with hemline folds over dull leather shoes. Light grey shirts buttoned under black and white striped ties were normal for men. Married women wore three-quarter length dresses made of similar material. Usually of dull grey or green colours. Shoes of black or brown leather with low raised heels over patterned stockings. They tied their hair if it was blonde up in a bun. If it was brown or black, they plaited it into long thick and impressive looking ponytails. These hung at the centre of the back. The only red haired woman he had seen wore her hair loose and trailing over her shoulders.
The lady whom Johnny had spoken to at the barbeque party in Poland was unique. She wore tight nylon shorts over her legs and long grey woollen socks. Her sand shoes made of rubber and leather, and a black t-shirt under a lapel-led and pocketed denim jacket. She had excused herself for wearing her work clothes that afternoon. And she had asked him what freedom was and how people could afford that. He saw no drug-addled dropouts in ripped and unwashed clothes. Neither any decorated patterns on shirts and no flared jeans or any leather jackets. The weather was not warm and so he saw no large areas of exposed skin. Even if the weather had been hot he would not have expected to anyway. The hairstyles were as conservative as their manners of speech. He did not feel threatened. The people adhered to routines without effort or fuss. If a person must go from one place to another within a limited distance they walked. The greatest group of pedestrians he had seen gathered together was in Kiev. They had looked like an epitome of Soviet-Union class business impresarios.
He never formed any long lasting relationships with the citizens. From the nations he travelled through that year, they remained strangers. After their emigration and occasional immigration into his home country, became acquaintances. He was happy to work with them, but he did not want to marry. Although the 212th Battalion gained remembrance. He later lived close to several of its veteran companions. He worked, played and argued with them well into the future.
From the council of Luxembourg, he walked after the tell-tale signs of the trucks again. He soon met them waiting in another van line. He clambered aboard one and woke up several sleeping women. So he saw that he had got aboard the female personnel wagon. He got out and into a male personnel transporter. He waited sleeping until the van moved again. This time it moved into a narrow street in an old city centre. Here the buildings dated from the medieval era and were still in use. Gargoyles nestled next to the tops of pointed spires and watched down on him in the night. He thought that the cobble pavement might crack from the weight of the army. But the old stone held fair.
A broken white line of paint marked the parallel centre of the alley. His comrades in arms spoke with him. They gave him quiet instruction. He was to go across the road and wake up the sleeping occupants of a castle. The reason being for support to the strategy. Concealed inside was a foreign legionnaire whom the occupation needed. He hit the door with his fist and a wooden slide knocked open sideways in a slot in the stone wall.
“Go away. Vito,” came a voice from inside. He could see a gnarled old face through the slot. Johnny refused to leave and demanded access and attendance from the French man. “We have rifles,” came the voice. Despite this Johnny persisted. He climbed the side of the building. A vertical chute between arch and spire allowed his arms and legs to wedge upward. He achieved the roof. Pigeon droppings spotted on copper flashing.
He opened a hatch which led to a stair and walked down into the stronghold. He came to a lounge. Three men were well aware there despite the lateness of the time in the past-midnight hours. They began talking with the sub lieutenant while sipping whiskey from tumblers. The legionnaire expressed reluctance. His life was stable and safe. He disliked risk. Johnny insisted on his service. He explained that this call up came from a force of troops spread across the continent. The wall was being dismantled. The old man came around and agreed to lend the aid. He had a contact with access to small fighter jets with artillery ordnance. He could make a call. His black enamel dial-up telephone was on a desk in an office under the stairs.
"We wanted an oak desk, but all we got was pine," he said. "I suppose that we can't be that important. You know, despite our reputation, we are not all actually that dangerous. Anyway I have heard of some of the current events. Your visit only confirms the rumours. Our leader has accepted the blackmail to undertake a failed mission. This could predict the end of the socialist system on the continent. Damn it. We couldn't hide here forever. Still, if given an opportunity to resist the pressures from America, then I can. That would make us dangerous." He laughed and finished his whisky.
He spoke to his two compatriots. "Louis, Abel, I am going to have to embark on a long underground journey to arrange precision equipment. I promise to be back, although it might not be to exactly here. Let's engage ourselves with a game of dice throws. We'll calculate the odds of losing. I'll make the call to the flight leader at dawn. Heaven knows, he needs his sleep. I don't. You," he pointed a cane at Johnny. "Leave the building by the same way you came in. Go back to whatever you are. Bastard, bastard."
The kid skipped a return to the van over the roof and down the wall. The curses from the men in the castle echoed behind him.
Back in the truck, a fellow man pointed out something to him about his gas mask. In broken English, he explained that Johnny's issue had a spy bug. The particular one he had in the ghetto had a tracing element in it. This could return signals from satellite and radar. “It’s the six-six-six model,” he said, “Because of Starling and his madness. Take it apart, take it out and throw it away; or else we all might get killed, because if you die, we all will. It’s your job.” Johnny felt some anxiety at this warning and did as the man told. A soldier’s kit has an army knife in it and he found his and dismantled and located the Strontium 90 pellet. He left it on the street between two cobblestones.
The white line on the road represented a division of political ideologies. For the Czechs, party members within the country must separate. A result of cohesive struggle for independence at the end of a long unfortunate history. Repeated foreign domination had come to this. On one side, communist politics were precedent. On the opposite side of the street they were American sympathetic agents. From the American side, people waved greetings from windows. While on the other things were a bit grim and silent, closed. A woman greeted the battalion whom he later encountered at the end of the mission in another country. She wore the accepted United Nations civilian uniform of blue denim with a white shirt. She was young, blonde and pretty. She had the persona of a motivated freedom fighter in her prime of life and had the grace to laugh.
They were leaving the small nation. During personnel count the lieutenant told him, “You are late. I’d have expected as much from a stripper like you. Don’t be late again, we all have work to do and time will become the most important thing this world has.” He spoke to all the troopers in the wagon. “The ultimatum's instated, and no-one can make any mistakes. We have to get there first. We are going into Romania and that place is full of trouble at present. The velvet revolution has blown away their sense of responsibility to each other. More, their President doesn’t know what to do. He’s trying to impose order and they won’t comply. I can’t take any back-handed gestures, no fighting in the ranks and no insubordination. My officers know as well as I do that I can’t do without any of you. We’re a small occupation and what we do will affect history, and the reporters will want to know. After Romania we’re headed for a small area of infantry territory past Sofia. That’s the next country, as close to Turkey as we will be able to get. We’ll receive orders there and after that your welfare is not my business. Protect your selves and no frigging around. So watch yourselves.”
The van moved off at top speed. On the road they opened a large bottle of high-proof vodka and swigged on it. Operatives passed it around from person to person. The trip was going well for all and he talked with a pretty female private who told him that they were in Hungary. They would never see it as they were behind canvass. She said that this was a pity because it was a beautiful country to behold. The weather cooled right down to zero minus thirty degrees centigrade. So they handed around a few brain numbing meds. These stopped the bite of the frost from through their bulky coats and leggings. The conversation revolved around medals. They compared a little of each persons’ prior military mission achievements. The roar and sway of the truck lulled him to sleep until the next border approached.
The crossing of the border into Romania had tight control. It was the highest security he had been through since Berlin. Here a team of border guards boarded the trucks and checked everyone’s passes. Johnny’s was no different from all the rest of them so he received no special attention. The whole procedure finished in a chorus of shouts and orders and replies. It mimicked the security guard staff change at the power station in Germany. The van rolled onwards to Alba-Julia.
The peoples’ counter-revolution was fervent and aggressive in this country. Unfortunately, it was all caught up in the mad power grab and rush of atomic supremacy. Before the van got to Alba-Julia the crew stopped at a scientific air base. They must to negotiate with the unsuspecting aeronautics engineer who worked there. In a cold grim night, they halted by a flat concrete panelled section. People gathered around a gasoline fire. An otherwise disused metal drum stood on its end on the hard pavement. It was the same type of scene which a person could expect to see among homeless anywhere in any major city. The homeless huddled for shelter and heat together. Their chief approached the team of conceited crack trainees. He asked them what they were there for. When the six soldiers who had disembarked met him they held up their passports. They held with it some cash and weapons close to his face in the dark.
Isaac was a large tired looking man of senior years. Not yet old enough to have become slow and doddery. But old enough to have added weight to his waistline and cynicism to his words. He wore thick black glass lenses on round spectacle frames.
The soldiers announced themselves as the British SAS. They demanded that this man, who gave his name as Isaac Sakharov, enable the fire system. A forty-foot high rocket and warhead still on his concrete pad. Isaac replied that this was madness. The rocket was not ready and he did not know if it ever could be. He explained that it was a dud experiment built to fulfil a budget return demand to keep them all at work. Johnny and his men said they did not care and that these were their demands.
Sakharov straight away demanded a payment in mercenary form. For the effort they had ordered him. He collected cash and passports from the hands of the crew. This is how Johnny’s British passport went missing. He looked at the hulk of a rocket beyond the burning drum. He saw a tall metal cylinder with flared base fins and conical top. He felt in his own perception about avionics that it in fact looked as though it could not go anywhere far. If fuel was to launch it, it would likely turn and fall and crash. There was little realistic chance that a hulk like that could travel. Over the North Pole towards Alaska was not workable.
This was a drill with a purpose to test the local air force workers’ morale and intent in these last days of the arms race. Even so the scientist turned and shouted in his own language to his employees. They were to siphon fuel into the barrel cylinder of the rocket to prepare for a launch test. A bottle fell from hands in the gang of fire gazers and it crashed to the pavement. The platoon turned self-satisfied. Climbed into the truck wagon again and continued their contradictory sojourn. They continued through the night landscapes of this the vampire country.
The following day Johnny found himself manning artillery. He was six levels up in a concrete building in a city centre. It had a similarity to the previous capitals he had operated in. He was with a native man who spoke no language of his. Likewise, neither could translate. They discussed procedure by hand signal and a simple system of ‘Da’ and ‘Nyet’. Finger-taps on their wrist watches indicated time. The gun was pointing out of a window without glass at an old Tsarist style spire tower building.
This tower building was similar in style to old Russian imperialist capital structures. They were like the Kremlin in that it was grandiose and abstract. Still whimsical and could be mistaken for a church steeple. It represented to the persons there all that was oppressive on them. The symbol which was being pushed away for the sakes of the world beyond their borders.
When ground troops ran into and about the civic square area at its base, they shouted and fired shots into the air. As they did this Johnny and his mate loaded shells into the canon and fired at the spire across the square. Twelve pound shells shot through the night air. Mortar fell from the decorated tower. Dust rose and sirens wailed from police who were powerless to stop the events. Shot after shot fired from both artillery men and foot soldiers. They had started at eleven pm. and by one am. only a ruin was in the place of what used to be the working class peoples power emblem.
That was the simpler part of his place in the velvet revolution there. What took place later was of significance to diplomacy. It remained in secrecy, and it was part of a sequence of failures which led to a tragedy. Nobody actually knew how much there they lost.
The president and his police chief wished to leave their country. They could not travel by road about the dangers this invited. President Caucasus owned a small helicopter. In this he wanted to escape to Moscow with his family and the chief. Johnny had become involved in his attempt at an escape flight.
Back at his home Johnny had taken helicopter piloting lessons. His senior officers in the army during this occupation had recognized him as a budding pilot. Between untranslatable phrases and hand signals, Johnny received the order to go up. The president and his family and colleague a wanted to go a distance which the craft could not cover. There were no places to refuel. The cities ahead would imprison him. He asked where the aviation fuel stops were along the way, and asked for maps with a plotted course. They replied that there were no aviation fuel stops between Bucharest and Kiev. None from Kiev to Moscow.
The total distance ahead was a thousand miles. He was not told where in Kiev was the airport or in Moscow. He was not provided any map and did not speak the same language as them. He did not want to be under lock and key or interrogation. Some of his platoon mates were already locked up after the event in the set up at the brothel in Prague. Healthy young fools in some gulag. Nor could he not tell why they had not employed another pilot. Someone who could converse and who knew the territory. Whom could be an ideological party member.
Despite this he could not refuse the job.
It was a small civilian class helicopter, the brand name of which Johnny knew as Serendipity. The type was in many countries; fuelled and started. The blades revolved to flying speed and the rear rotor also turned. Caucasus and his wife and baby granddaughter got in and sat squeezed up next to each other in the rear seat. The police chief in a suit as black as his moustache latched a seat-belt in the front. He sat to the left of the reluctant pilot. Johnny snorted back a ball of resentment and latched himself in to the seat with the pedals and stick. The night of wounded pride had begun.
He looked at the face of the police chief and recognized him. Two years previous at his grandfather’s house in Paramaribo. A reception held for officials from Europe. His grandfather had been a judge and as judges must he hosted those from far and wide to discuss matters of state. A man with jet black hair and black moustache had then engaged John in a conversation. As it so happened he was a chief from Romania. Johnny had asked how justice meted out there, and the man had mentioned asylum laws. In response Johnny mentioned madness and the man talked about crucifixions. The conversation had gone bad. Now, this was the same man and his society and staff were turning against him. He and his political employer wanted out, and Johnny was not sure that he could give it to them.
He stepped on the pedal and raised the stick. The helicopter lifted from the third floor roof of the home office. He performed a long lazy turn counter clockwise. The compass read in an opposite manner to what he had trained with in the southern hemisphere. This confused him. The past three weeks of imbibing vodka not water was not helping. Red fiery tracers from army rifles lined the sky and he elevated to avoid them.
He could get only one competent bearing in the whole urgent operation. That was to the next city south within the same country. He mused that his liberty was worth more to him than the whole nation’s rank of politicians and rulers. That he could either try to take it into the Ukraine and crash the craft in hope of an airport. The politicians were desperate for their lives. They had put their lives in the trust of a stranger junior officer whom they knew nothing about. Or he could tell his official occupants in their own helicopter, to go to hell. He did the latter.
“You can’t say that to me, madman,” said the police chief.
“Then show me the map, smart ass,” said Johnny over a belly full of umbrage.
“Turn this craft around and get it to the Ukraine,” said the police chief.
“I can’t sir. This chopper holds forty-five minutes’ worth of flying time in fuel. If logic is correct then Kiev is one and a half hours’ flying from here. We’d crash in a field if we tried that,” he said.
“Then crash in a field! Get me out of my country,” said the chief.
This was not the first time that a lowly ranked marine had usurped control of a political operation. All done for the sakes of his own independence. Johnny said, “Look you communist prick it’s your fault not mine. I don’t hear you saying that you’re going to put me up in a hotel once we crawl into Moscow for you and the dickhead.” He was referring to the passenger in the back.
“What’s happening darling?” said Caucasus’s wife.
“I don’t know,” replied the President.
The helicopter was by this time leaving the urban sprawl beneath. He flew on a Southern course over hillsides and darkened fields. The lights of Bucharest were soon in sight. The President rummaged through the soldier’s kit bag placed next to him in the back seat. “He has weapons,” he said.
“That’s a prison sentence,” said the police chief.
“Are you going to make it all turn high tide as well?” retorted the pilot, as he reached behind him and found both a block of cheese and a canister of toxic gas in his bag. He threw both of these out of the helicopter. The objects landed unseen in a farm far below them. They fulfilled an object of a story told by a dedicated communist farm worker. He told about how he found the stolen goods during the revolution. The craft continued on being now three kilograms lighter in weight in the air. He kept his gun.
“When I said, ‘take me to Moscow,’ I meant it,” said Caucasus.
“So what, I didn’t,” said Johnny. He could see the lights of the capital beneath them. He flew over the city observing the patterns. Until he identified an assortment of flashing red and blues. He put it down in a field.
Caucasus needed to get out. His wife carried their infant granddaughter. With the pilot they hurried towards yet another civic square. People gathered together shouting and waving white flags. The President’s wife thrust the child into Johnny’s arms and she and her husband merged into the rushing crowd.
Johnny took the girl and followed a darkened road away from all the commotion. To where he found a locked iron and oak door. In the rock wall next to the door were ancient cross design arrow slits. He knocked with a fist several times.
After a wait, bars made a thudding noise from inside and keys turned and it swung open revealing a nun. He explained that the girl he had was from the government and needed caretaking. She said, “What an evil man,” and held her arms outstretched and took the infant from him. He made the sign of the cross with two fingers and a thumb placed together on his head shoulders and chest. Then hurried away to return to the helicopter in the field.
When he got there he saw the police chief surrounded by his staff. The meeting was not one of assent. It was a challenging and difficult confrontation. The chief stood in the centre of a phalanx of armed men who were all in the same uniform and looked of equal rank. They all had Kalashnikov rifles aimed at him and were demanding that he leave the country. Their chief told them that he had tried. This was when Johnny fired one from his pistol into the air to draw attention to him.
“Take him to England,” a policeman said to him. “We’ll get you the car to the airfield, you can arrange a jet.”
He could do nothing else but agree. They went to an airfield and into a hotel there. The driver demanded the chief’s absence from the country during the whole way. The chief stayed in one room and Johnny used another which had a radio communicator in it. He started using the radio, signalling for any English 212th Battalion operatives. He had told the Chief to stay in his room and not to make a noise or show that he was there. Unless the revolutionaries might claim his life, and he also was operating in secrecy.
Despite the Law’s hospitality, they were doing so only for the sakes of the Chief’s absence. The responsibility to make that so had fallen to Johnny, a stranger and a foreigner.
A call came in from a previous man. The lieutenant who had lectured the troops at the Czech border. John was still part of the personnel count. The lieutenant advised that a Royal Air Force Skyhawk jet prepared and spared in the base where Johnny and the chief hid. It was only a matter of meeting times in secret to get the passenger away. This was going to be the first time Johnny had flown a jet solo without the help of brothers or trainers.
In the darkened hotel room Johnny chose the correct flying gloves. He also drew hats and scarves from a drawer for him and his passenger. He whispered through a common door between rooms to the chief that they would be leaving at two am. They waited until then, resting and drinking tea in silence. All the while in his mind he recreated from his training the avionic skills that the flight would need. Mentally he repeated the necessary steps. At the given time his lieutenant radioed one word, and that was ‘Now.’
He opened the door between rooms and signalled the passenger up and ready. They ran bent over in the night with pistols in their hands. Out of the hotel was a half mile of air base to cross for the only English plane in a fleet of M I G’s. The lieutenant had released the stays and opened the pilot and seat hatches for them already.
In haste they harnessed their bodies into the seats and clipped on their helmets and masks. Guided by hand held flags which the lieutenant waved in the proper sequence on the runway ahead of them. Johnny taxied the plane to the end of the strip.
Ground support gave a circular wave. This indicated for the take-off manoeuvre to start. Within a minute they were airborne. The power of acceleration of a first class jet is something to experience. Any adrenaline feeding thrill seeker would enjoy it. The police chief grunted, this followed by a series of unintelligible profanities. Johnny laughed as he felt the freedom of rising altitude over alp and through cloud layers.
Ground control broke into the headset radio. Russian voices demanded identity and purpose. Johnny switched on his radio to twin channel broadcast. Together they identified themselves as KGB. class departed. Tracers fired behind them and Johnny elevated higher to deter them. Within twenty-six minutes they were within communication distance with Germany. He had left the aerospace of the biggest social prison in history behind them.
School boy German is not much to talk with flight controllers to in their own language and nation. But that is all that Johnny had to escape the firepower of central Europe. Given their elevation and course, the German authorities waited. The air control could see that his airplane was not a threat but only a nuisance. Soon a loud and clear voice interrupted the chaos of signal and call sign. It stated ‘Speak English.’ Johnny did so and sent the necessary code words. He circled Northrop three times before clearance to land granted them.
He lined up the screaming jet to land his first important flight. The flight traffic controllers told him that his appearance had been a surprise. That he had the skill required for European airspace. And that his style of flying was a punishment to the machine.
The passenger ran with the pilot and an accompaniment of blustering officers away from the plane and into diplomatic custody. Reporters photographed the scene of the hurry. A picture on the cover of Newsweek magazine ran the question in a headline, ‘Who is this man?’
Johnny received a debriefing about his activities. They gave him six days of rest and recreation before he was again posted to his job in the nations east of Germany. They decided that since he was doing so well so far, he might as well get back to it. No-one he talked with in London knew what he had been getting up to in Europe. but they said that it sounded like he was onto something big. He checked out some of the London social life and was then flown back to the same airfield as he had departed. At the airfield he was re-recruited with a new platoon in the same truck that he had been moving in across the land. There had been rumours of a control tower and they ascribed this as a destination and purpose. The worst was yet to come.
He assigned into a team of sixteen youth recruits in a barracks. They were a young team, mixed of men and women as every team had been so far. Not a one of them being over the age of twenty-one years. They spent the night mending and polishing uniforms. Maintaining and checking their rifles. Discussing amongst them the benefits of being in the army. The highest ranking private had the name Severus. He stated how much he appreciated the work and esteem it gave him. The risks inherent in the job matched trouble and enterprise attracted in any daily life.
In the morning the team drove out from the co-ordination centre. They drove with an aim to cross the Danube River and into the next nation. From Ilko County the driver lost time by traveling towards Constant at the delta. There the blue grey Danube River meets the Black Sea. She was trying to be inconspicuous by not going to the steel Giuliani-Ruse Bridge. This resulted in a shocking event. It disturbed them and preyed on their mind for years following.
The truck followed a trail into parkland. Innocent people rested with picnic wine on the grass field. A wooden rail met the trail on left and right side, and allowed a small access into a wilderness beyond it. The driver continued. The single truck travelled alone from the others from a previous caravan of many. It crossed into a complex area. Shrub and overgrown weeds ranged about in an unmarked wasteland. The ground became wet and the air had a fresh watery smell to it. All day they drove through this area. They had no particular direction to go except to keep the depths of the river on their right side. The driver’s hope was to divert any attention away from them. She intended to become lost, so to slip into Bulgaria unannounced. The end of day shadows grew long as she wended through the thicket. She parked the truck in a similar boggy clearing between poisonous trees.
This allowed the platoon a night sleep before the light of the next day was to show them a way out of the wilderness. Johnny lay beneath his blanket next to the other soldiers on the steel floor and benches of the trailer. He was on third watch. He ate a small and simple meal of cheese and crackers and burnt two cigarettes. Soon truck, soldiers and watchman were all hidden beneath the dark canopy of night.
At four in the morning the second watchman shook him awake. It was John’s turn to guard. The man who handed over the responsibility to him said that there was trouble in view. That he had seen black figures moving towards the truck from the direction of the river. Whoever they were, they were keeping to the cover of the trees. Johnny followed order to fire away a series of warning shots from out of the cover of the wagon. This method trusted to warn away. To keep those unknown approaching bodies away from them and their temporary sleep out.
He lay on his belly on the steel tray of the trailer and pointed the rifle ahead of him. He cradled it on his right shoulder and stayed it with his right hand at the trigger. His left hand held the block and both eyes aimed by watching along its straight top edge. He looked past the metal pins at the barrel. Slow, giving quarter of a minute between shots, he fired first right then centre then to the left ahead of him. He continued this momentum until at dawn he had dispensed the last bullet in a magazine of one hundred.
A wide arc had covered by peppering shots into the wasteland past the rear of the truck. The first grey light of day seeped into grass and water. A brief silence fell as weather calms after a storm.
All the members of the platoon were wide awake by now and Severus was giving the orders. Until this time his conversation had covered philosophy and sacrifice. That was in the past, in barracks and transport. The chance of reality repeating its same consequences until infinity. This as related in evidence by the writings of Nietzsche. Severus believed that no greater sacrifice could a man give but that for his country. That religious law was as good as damned.
The order that Severus gave led to the sacrifice of his platoon. The young patriots were not allowed a chance to repeat any consequence. He ordered them out of the wagon cover and onto the wet grass. They did not know who the black shirted invaders were and nor did Johnny ever find out.
The invaders had avoided the bullet cover. They emerged with pistols in fists. As the troop ran in a line out of the truck and into the middle of the field, they fired. Their shots direct. A dozen persons took .36 in the neck, chest and back and then two more. As though an invisible force had thrown them there, all fourteen persons fell in a heap one on another in the bog. Loud shots rang out into the new day’s air and smoke rose from barrel and body. Severus was at the bottom of the pile and Johnny and a woman stayed and watched it all from in the trailer.
The last two survivors reloaded their magazines into their rifles. They ran firing to the cabin. Johnny clambered into the driver’s seat and the woman sat on passenger’s left. In shock he turned keys in ignition. He could not explain how they drove away from the massacre without receiving enemy fire. The assassins had used all their bullets, or they had always planned to allow for survivors.
He drove through tall weeds on an unmarked trail. He and the lady discussed the invisible presence of God in even the worst of situations. If he had had the choice, he would have stayed with that lady for all his life. But he never saw her again shortly after they crossed the Giuliani-Ruse Bridge.
Guards completed the passport checks. They wore the tell-tale black shirted uniforms at both sides of the river. Johnny stated that he had survived a horror and pleaded for sympathy. He said that his business was in inter-governmental security. So he saw to it that they realized that he was there on bolshevist business, and they let him through. He and his compatriot were now in Bulgaria.
