"Moscow," Malcolm announced slowly, his face becoming ashen. His next words were tight but emphatic: "Larissa, Gideon — I suggest you both get to the turret." Larissa needed no encouragement but got quickly to her feet and began pulling me toward the door to the corridor. "We'll wait until he's passed Smolensk," Malcolm called after us. "If there's no deviation—"
Larissa turned. "That's cutting it a little close, isn't it, Brother? Given his speed—"
"Given his speed, Sister, your aim had better be true…"
There is a terrible simplicity to what remains of this part of my tale, a barren brevity that I would gladly embellish if doing so would alter the outcome. Larissa and I scarcely exchanged a word as we took up our positions in the turret; and during the next three quarters of an hour, as eastern Poland and western Russia shot unrecognizably by beneath us, silence continued to reign in that transparent hemisphere, unbroken, now, even by the continued sounds of cannon fire and missile explosions; for the Allied planes had abandoned their pursuit long before we entered the unpredictable airspace of that very unpredictable ruin of an empire, Russia. I do not know what Larissa was thinking, as in the days to come I did not think to ask her; as for me, I found myself wondering what must have been going through her mind as she prepared to end yet another man's life. It seemed certain that she would be called on to do so: Eshkol's own behavior had offered us no alternative to his execution, really, since the moment we'd first become aware of him. The only thing left to do now, I mused to myself as we waited in the turret, was hope that as few people as possible would be injured or killed on the ground.
It never occurred to me that Eshkol's plane might simply disappear; yet somewhere between Minsk and Smolensk it seemed to do just that. There was no sign of the thing on any of my equipment, nor, as Malcolm soon informed us, on any of the ship's other monitoring systems. I was profoundly confused, until Larissa pointed out the simplest possible explanation: that Eshkol had crashed. My spirits jumped at the thought, but I forced myself to be skepticaclass="underline" Wouldn't we have seen the flames? Or detected the descent? Wouldn't Eshkol have ejected if he'd found himself in distress? Not necessarily, Larissa answered; planes could and did crash without significant explosions, and so suddenly as to make tracking their loss of altitude problematic. And nighttime flying conditions could sometimes be so disorienting that a doomed pilot never even knew he was in trouble. All the same, a massive set of double-checks of the area and our ship's systems seemed urgent, and Larissa and I returned to the nose of the ship to assist with them. But the whole of our crew could find neither clues on the ground nor equipment malfunctions on board our vessel. It genuinely did seem that Eshkol's plane had been lost, probably in some field or forest where its hulk would not be discovered until daybreak, if then.
How could we have known? What would have caused any of us to once again turn our monitoring ears toward Malaysia, where we would have learned about the theft of more than just the B-2 bomber? And even had we by some chance learned that a pilfered American stealth system — so advanced and secret that only a handful of people in the United States knew that its design had been stolen— had been installed in that same B-2, would we have been able to meet the challenge of defeating it in time? All such questions were horrifically moot. One fact held sway, that night as this, and on all nights in between:
At the very moment that each of us began to believe that our luck with regard to Eshkol might have changed, the horizon to the northeast came alive with a lovely, brilliant light. Given that our perspective was unblocked, the sudden glow was enough to attract the attention of all of us; and, deathly aware of what was happening, none of us said a word during the inevitable denouement as the signature cloud, angry with all the terrible colors of the explosion that had just been unleashed, slowly began to form above what had once been the city of Moscow.
CHAPTER 41
The horrendous, transfixing fireball had begun to fade long before any of us could find words to acknowledge it. When at last someone did speak, it was Eli, giving voice to the same question that was in all our minds: How had Eshkol gotten away from us? No one could provide an answer, of course, and the terrible query was to hang accusingly in the air throughout our journey back to St. Kilda, where Colonel Slayton, after long hours in the monitoring room, would finally discover the explanation. For the moment, however, we all just shook our heads and went on staring silently, bewildered not only as to how the tragedy had been possible but about what we should do next. At length it was, not surprisingly, Malcolm who brought us out of our horrified daze: in a voice that grated like grinding rocks and matched the deathly pallor of his face, he ordered Larissa to pilot the ship into the burning city, a command that brought a collective gasp of disbelief from the rest of us. Seeing the extent of her brother's devastation, Larissa spoke very gently and carefully when she suggested that such a flight might be dangerous; but Malcolm angrily retorted that the ship would keep us safe from radiation, at least for a time, and that he needed to see the devastation — as, he added, did we all. Without further discussion Larissa took the helm, and we made the flight — and in so doing experienced a loss of innocence such as comparatively few people in the world's history have, thankfully, ever known.
There are no words; none that I can find, at any rate. Shall I describe how many shades I discovered there to be in what are usually labeled "gray" ashes, as well as the infinite range of colors that characterize what is generally dismissed as "scorched earth"? And what prose can describe the sickening image of those thousands of brutally burned and torn human bodies, both living and dead, that had escaped actual vaporization? Yet I could not turn away. I once heard it said that destruction perversely but consummately intrigues the eye; but I'd never expected to see the assertion borne out by my own fixation on so nightmarish a panorama.
Ground zero of the blast had, predictably, been the Kremlin, behind whose walls the demented Josef Stalin had once drunk peppered vodka and plotted genocide, though not the genocide in which Dov Eshkol had imagined him to be complicit. Nothing remained, of course, of this structure and its surrounding district; nor was there very much left of Red Square or of the Tverskaya commercial district, which Stalin himself had redesigned, or of fashionable Arbatskaya or of the medieval suburb of Zamoskvorechie across the Moscow River. The miniature bomb had been powerful enough to tear the very heart out of the city, and out of Russia itself — all to avenge an imaginary sin that the profoundly unbalanced Eshkol had desperately needed to believe was real so that he might finally have a rationalization for his brutal maintenance of what he thought was faith with his ancestors and prove himself worthy in the imagined eyes of all those who had died so long ago.
Mundus vult decipi.
The grim tour of the devastated city that Malcolm had believed so necessary ultimately proved too much for him: guilt, exhaustion, and shock all combined with his chronic weakness to produce a crisis, one that I don't think came as a shock to any of the rest of us. Indeed, it seems a wonder now that more of our party didn't collapse under the burden of those sights. Colonel Slayton once again slung the terribly stricken Malcolm's left arm around his shoulders and with his own right arm lifted that drastically underweight body fully off the floor and started off toward the stern of the ship. Larissa pressed herself against me once hard, somehow suspecting — quite rightly — that everything had changed as a result of what we had just witnessed; then she went off to tend to her brother, holding his dangling right hand tightly as Slayton carried him. Eli set the ship's helm on a preprogrammed course for St. Kilda, and then at last the rest of us drifted away, each trying to find some solitude in which to come to terms with the incomprehensible.