Jake Grafton hadn’t even been born then, but Yakolev was a young soldier in the Soviet army. Once again Jake pondered the twists of fate that had lifted Yakolev to the top, wondered again about the man who wore that uniform.
The window was scratched from being repeatedly wiped with dirty rags, but Jake managed to get a look through it at the land sliding by thirty thousand or so feet below. Forests, occasional small villages, roads that followed the contours of the land.
It just didn’t look like America, or even western Europe. Those landscapes had their own distinct look that an experienced air traveler would recognize at a glance. Part of the problem, Jake decided, was that Russia was just too big. Great distances were the blessing that caused Napoleon and Hitler to founder and the curse that had stymied generations of Communist economic planners.
Soon Jake heard the power being reduced and felt the nose drop a degree or two as the pilot began his descent.
All this talk about weapons…it would be good finally to see some of the damned things.
The weapons were being disassembled in a makeshift clean room that didn’t look any too tight. This was the scene of Yakolev’s show-and-tell session. The Western visitors gathered in front of a plate-glass window and watched white-robed technicians use mechanical arms to manipulate the warhead parts while an interpreter translated Yakolev’s comments, which were in Russian. Amazingly, when they entered the facility no one had offered them film badges to record the level of radiation to which they might be exposed, nor was anyone working here wearing one.
Beside the general stood a man in civilian clothes who looked nervous. Jake assumed he was the manager of this facility. Occasionally Yakolev asked him a question and pondered the reply, but the interpreter didn’t translate these exchanges.
From the clean room an army truck took the party to a large hangar where row after row of missiles sat on their transporters. Against one wall were stacked wooden crates of pallets — nuclear warheads. The small party stood in silence taking it all in.
Yakolev stood beside Jake. Finally he spoke, in English. “Impressive, yes?”
“That it is.”
“Russia shook the world with these missiles,” Yakolev said. “And now we take them apart.”
Jake Grafton searched the older man’s impassive face.
“We become another poor country without a voice in the world’s affairs,” the general continued after a moment, still looking at the row upon row of missiles decorated with huge red stars. “The television brings us news of the great things that are happening in Washington, New York, London, Paris, Bonn… We learn the thoughts of the great men of our age. The world’s leaders ponder the future of mankind and debate how much money to give Russia while we eat our potatoes and borsch.”
Yakolev slapped Jake on the back. “That is progress, no? No more bad old Communists! Now Russians buy televisions and watch CNN and the BBC and bet on world cup soccer and tennis matches at Wimbledon. They worry about stock prices in Tokyo and London and New York. No more bad old Russians! They are just like us.”
Yakolev turned away and Jake Grafton watched his retreating back. Then he stood looking at the missiles.
General Yakolev excused himself for a few hours work, so Jake asked for a tour of the base. This disconcerted the civilian interpreter, but within a few minutes a military guide-interpreter was provided. “What want to see?” the man asked with a heavy accent, wearing a perplexed look.
“The enlisted barracks, the mess hall and the hospital,” Jake told him.
The guide was in uniform, with a rank designation that Jake didn’t recognize, and now he looked around in bewilderment. Jake guessed that he was in his early twenties. Seeing no one handy to voice his concerns to, yet unwilling to refuse the request of this important foreign visitor in the strange uniform, he slowly led Jake and Toad out the door of the hangar office and set a course across the packed dirt toward a distant building.
“What’s your name?”
“Mikhail Babkin, sir.”
“You speak excellent English.” Jake Grafton mouthed the complimentary lie easily, without a twinge of conscience. English is different than all other languages, he reflected. Most Frenchmen listening to badly spoken French will pretend that they cannot understand or ignore the offender entirely. Yet any American meeting a goatherd in sub-Sahara Africa or on the windswept steppes of Mongolia who knows a word or two of pidgen English will compliment that worthy on his command of the language.
The barracks was of concrete construction, the usual Russian mix of too little cement, too much sand. The soldiers lived in one large, smelly, musty room with wooden bunks without springs. In the middle of the room stood a wood stove with an exhaust pipe leading to the roof. The bathrooms were communal, with no seats on the filthy toilets and one large shower with five drippy heads. There was no hot water heater. The smell…
“No hot water?”
“Hot? No.”
For an American naval officer who had spent half his adult life aboard ship where men were forced to live together in close quarters, this barracks was an appalling sight. The men who lived here must be constantly sick.
The mess hall was even worse. It was filthy, without refrigeration facilities or hot water. Jake asked how the dishes were washed and was told that each man dips his plate into a large drum of cold water. He was shown the drums.
At the hospital he wandered the corridors and looked at the soldiers in the beds. They stared back at him. He peeked into one empty operating room with little equipment.
“Where do you sterilize the instruments?” They are boiled, he was told. There was a sink in the anteroom, the taps dripping. He turned them on full and let them run. Uh-oh.
“Hot water?”
“Hot? No. Want see X-ray machine?”
Stunned, Jake left the dimly lit building meekly when an officious person, presumably the administrator or doctor in charge, fired a volley of Russian at their escort and pointed at the door.
“The sewage treatment plant… I want to see the sewage treatment plant.”
The translator had great difficulty understanding the request. Toad got into the act. Finally Jake realized that there was no sewage treatment plant. Eventually it became clear that the sewage was piped straight to the local river. The translator led them to the bank where they could look down upon the discharge pipes.
And nearby was the garbage dump. Above ground. The wind brought a whiff of it to where Jake and Toad and the translator were standing. Some small creature darted toward the pile, birds wheeled above, clouds of flies…
For all these years, Jake thought savagely, we have been told about the vast capabilities of the Soviet military machine. And it’s all a lie. The shiny missiles and pretty tanks are the whole show. The men who must operate these weapons are poorly housed, in ill health, live in unsanitary conditions and eat food a Western health inspector would send to a landfill. It’s all a lie.
What was it General Brown had said? The Soviet Union is a nation in total social and economic collapse. Nothing works. Nothing!
He was in a subdued mood when he boarded the plane for the return flight to Moscow. General Yakolev made some comment but he paid no attention.
Toad Tarkington had a drink in each hand, and he held out one to Jake Grafton, who looked but didn’t reach.
“It’s Scotch on the rocks,” Toad said. Seeing the look on Grafton’s face, he added, “I broke the seal on the bottle myself and poured it.”