Mayor Poulson of Los Angeles — that pain-in-the-ass prick — felt differently about having a communist dictator delivered to his bailiwick, viewing Khrushchev with the warmth reserved for a bastard child found in a basket on a doorstep.
As the plane began to taxi toward him, Harrigan stood motionless in the noonday sun’s withering heat; but behind the black sunglasses his trained eyes were darting from the handful of put-upon perspiring dignitaries lined up across from him, to the press corps held back behind a cop-guarded barricade, to the small crowd of citizens who’d been aware of Khrushchev’s coming, and cared enough — for whatever reason — to witness the historic moment.
Harrigan was cataloguing every movement, scrutinizing every face, looking for any hand-held objects that weren’t fountain pens, cameras, or little American flags… and looking for certain kinds of faces, hot with rage or, even more dangerous, cold with rage…
Just because the crowd was paltry didn’t mean the agent could let his guard down, not for a heartbeat; it only took one person — in one heartbeat’s time — to pull out a gun and assassinate Khrushchev, and send the United States to the edge of a precipice beyond which was an all-too-real nuclear abyss.
Yup — just another day in the life of Jack Harrigan.
And had Harrigan deemed to remove his sunglasses, to take a better look at the meager mob, something else would have been revealed about the agent: dark circles under his eyes, indicating the lack of sleep and abundance of stress he’d endured this past week, which had begun dubiously — a bad omen, for those who believed in that kind of thing (and he did) — with the initial arrival of the Russians on American soil.
The Soviets had put down at Andrews Air Force Base, fifteen miles southwest of Washington D.C., in a huge Russian Tupolev jetliner. The use of that airplane — considerably longer and taller than its American counterpart — was a disaster in and of itself: when the metal debarkation staircase was wheeled up to its door, the ramp was too short. It was a scene out of a slapstick comedy: chaos broke out on the ground, while Khrushchev and company were left cooling their heels, until some poor bastard finally found a common household ladder.
When the Russians finally climbed ignobly out, and down, like sweethearts eloping in the middle of the night, Nikita Khrushchev was not in the mood for love; the dictator was red with rage. The press had a field — day snapping him and the portly missus, her dress wrapped tightly around her legs for modesty’s sake, coming down the ladder. Harrigan, working closely with the Secret Service boys (until recently he’d been Secret Service himself), saw to it that any film — whether news organization or civilian — was confiscated.
When a reporter pal of his had bitched, Harrigan said, “No way I’m gonna let World War III start up over some fat Russian broad gettin’ embarrassed… but don’t quote me.”
Various pomp and circumstance had awaited the Russian premier and his people at Andrews — the usual twenty-one-gun salute, President Eisenhower on hand, honor guards, ten bands massed to play both the Soviet national anthem, “Soyuz Nerushimy Respublik Svobodnykh,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A motorcade through the Maryland suburbs into Washington had been followed by a full-dress parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.
But none of it took the bite out of the ramp-and-ladder incident: strike one for the Americans — not at all an auspicious beginning to a last-ditch peace mission between two nations on a nuclear collision course.
At one point early on, when the Russians had still been aboard the Tupolev jet, Harrigan — watching from the sidelines as the catastrophe unfolded — thought he detected a small, smug smile briefly purse Khrushchev’s thick lips, as the dictator peered from the plane’s window at the Americans below, running around like ants that had their colony disturbed.
Surely the Russians knew the specifications of U.S. commercial jets. Had they built their plane bigger on purpose? Was this a cunning chess move, designed to make the Americans start off the trip with a blunder?
Later, when an obviously embarrassed President Eisenhower asked Khrushchev to leave the huge Tupolev behind at the base, and offered one of the Air Force’s new 707s for the rest of the premier’s cross-country trip, Harrigan again could only wonder: Had that been Khrushchev’s plan all along? Just how much national security would be compromised in the name of hospitality?
Harrigan of course had been briefed extensively on Khrushchev at the State Department. There was no denying that this man — however much the roly-poly despot might seem a thug or peasant-risen-to-power — was a smart and formidable adversary. He’d have to be, to have survived the bloody purges of Stalin.
Now Harrigan had had a week to form his own opinion of the Russian ruler, and found him to be a complicated man, whose disposition could turn on a dime, like a big precocious child. Amusing and warm at one moment, Khrushchev was an erupting human earthquake the next: shrewd and ruthless, and about as subtle about his wants and needs as a sailor on a three-hour pass.
At the moment, however, Harrigan was not the least bit interested in the inner workings of Nikita Khrushchev’s mind and what made this bomb of a man tick; he was concerned — make that panic-stricken — over the perils of making it through the last leg of what he considered to have been an ill-advised trip in the first place… a trip that had only deteriorated further with each stop along the way.
While in New York, the premier infuriated the United Nations delegation — Chiang Kai-shek’s democratic Nationalist China had refused to attend — who had generously allowed him to give a speech before the General Assembly. The Russian guest had repaid this gracious gesture by delivering a tirade punctuated with bellicose blustering and outright threats.
Still, Harrigan had noted, there had been a suggestion that what Khrushchev wanted most was peace…
Khrushchev — surprisingly dapper in a blue serge suit with gray tie and gold stickpin, two medals on his lapel — had taken the U.N. podium with his personal interpreter at his side, a handsome if vaguely sinister-looking young man named Oleg Troyanovsky. As Khrushchev spoke in his native tongue, his voice grew sharper and louder. The interpreter was able to soften the premier’s inflection, but not his words, which warned of world destruction unless the cold war came to an end, and disarmament began.
“Over a period of four years,” Khrushchev suggested, “all states should effect complete disarmament and should no longer have any means of waging war. Military bases on foreign territories shall be abolished, all atomic and hydrogen bombs destroyed…”
The delegates had no argument with that. But how? Khrushchev never said.
Twice before — in 1927 and 1932 — the Soviet Union had proposed total world disarmament of this kind, but on both occasions the rest of the world had recognized the proposal for what it was — a one-sided attempt to get every other nation to cast its armaments aside… while Russia refused adequate supervision to demonstrate that they were doing the same.
Khrushchev concluded his seventy-two minute speech by condemning the assembly for not allowing Mao Tse-tung’s Red China to join the United Nations. Nationalist China on Formosa, he told them, was all but dead, “a rotting corpse that should be carried out.” Delegates shifted uncomfortably in their seats, disgruntled murmurs rising among them.
After the media reported the speech, the mood of the general public — who previously had been guardedly polite toward the Russian leader in Washington and New York — began to shift ominously; and by Chicago, crowds had become downright hostile, as Khrushchev continued his lecturing on the evils of capitalism and of eminent Soviet domination.