John Barron - MiG Pilot

Never had Belenko been in a closed market selling meat or produce that did not smell of spoilage, of unwashed bins and counters, of decaying, unswept remnants of food. Never had he been in a market offering anything desirable that was not crowded inside, with lines waiting outside. Always he had been told that the masses of exploited Americans lived in the shadow of hunger and that pockets of near starvation were widespread, and he had seen photographs that seemed to demonstrate that.

If this were a real store, a woman in less than an hour could buy enough food in just this one place to feed a whole family for two weeks. But where are the people, the crowds, the lines? Ah, that proves it. This is not a real store. The people can’t afford it. If they could, everybody would be here. It’s a showplace of the Dark Forces. But I what do they do with all the meat, fruit and vegetables, milk, and everything else that they can’t keep here all the time? They must take it away for themselves every few nights and replace it.

As Peter and Nick steered him back toward the clothing store, Belenko bolted into a shop offering televisions, stereos, radios, and calculators. Several color television sets were tuned to different channels, and the brilliance and clarity of the hues as well as the diversity of the programs amazed him. So did a hand-held calculator and the technology it implied. But he was not fooled. A color television set in the Soviet Union cost a worker approximately five months’ wages, and because of difficulties with transistors and solid-state circuitry, the quality was poor. Obviously this was another showplace of the Dark Forces packed with merchandise affordable only by the exceedingly rich.

He had to appraise the clothing store only a minute or so to realize that it also was a fake. Here were perhaps 300 suits, along with sports jackets, overcoats, raincoats hanging openly on racks, piles of trousers and shirts lying openly on counters, ties within the reach of anybody passing; even the shoes were out in the open — and all this was guarded by only a few clerks. Peter found a section containing perhaps twenty-five suits Belenko’s size and started taking them from the rack for him to examine. They know him here, and that’s why he can do that.

A toothy, glad-handing salesman approached and among other banalities remarked, “It always makes me glad to see a father buying suits for his sons.” Belenko thought that whether planned or spontaneous, the comment, which Nick translated in a whisper, was hilarious, and thereafter Peter was known as Father Peter.

The three-piece flannel suit he selected at the advice of Peter required slight alterations, and the salesman suggested they could be made within half an hour if they had other shopping. More evidence. Who else but the Dark Forces could command such service? They purchased shirts, ties, underwear, socks, a warm-up suit and tennis shoes for jogging, a blazer, a raincoat with zip-out lining, and the finest pair of shoes Belenko had ever seen.

All of Belenko’s suspicions about the true nature of the shopping center were fully and finally validated when he saw a service station on the corner. Three cars, all, as it happened, driven by women, were being fueled at the same time, a boy was cleaning the windshield of one car, and there were no lines. In Belenko’s past life, gasoline outlets were so scarce that a wait of four or five hours for fuel was ordinary.

“I congratulate you,” Belenko said en route back to the mansion. “That was a spectacular show you put on for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that place; it’s like one of our show kolkhozes where we take foreigners.”

Nick laughed, but not Peter. “Viktor, I give you my word that what you’ve just seen is a common, typical shopping center. There are tens of thousands of them all over America. Anywhere you go in the United States, north, south, east, west, you will see pretty much the same. Many of the shopping centers in the suburbs of our cities are bigger and fancier and nicer.”

“Can the average American worker buy what we saw there? Can he buy a color television set?”

“Yes; if he’s willing to pay more than for a black-andwhite set, he can. I don’t know what the statistics are; I would guess more families have color sets than not. It’s nothing to own a color television. But look, don’t take my word. Wait until you travel around and see for yourself.”

Why argue with him? That’s his job.

The CIA had sent some thirty books and magazines in Russian to his room, and Peter urged him to read, relax, and sleep as much as he could. He showed him a well-stocked liquor cabinet, the kitchen and refrigerator crammed with food, including smoked salmon, herring, and cold borscht, and he pointed out the room where Nick always could be reached. “I almost forgot. Come on.”

From another bedroom Peter started pushing a portable color television set toward Belenko’s room, but after a few paces he stopped. “Nick, would you mind?” For the first tune Belenko discerned that there was something physically wrong with Peter. If he exerted himself even slightly, he could barely breathe.

That afternoon and evening Belenko experienced another transcendent spiritual upheaval as he read The Gulag Archipelago. In the blackness and iniquity of the concentration camps Solzhenitsyn depicts he saw the light and purity of truth, and he trembled again as he had in the Japanese prison. He finished about 10:00 P.M., took a beer from the refrigerator, and, attracted by the brightness of the moonlight and fragrance of the country ah-, decided to drink it on the veranda. As he opened the door, two men sprang up simultaneously, one with a pistol in hand. “Please excuse us,” he said in poor Russian. “We did not know it was you. Come out and make yourself at home.”

The Dark Forces, they are not stupid. They would not tell me I could see anywhere what I saw today unless that is true — or unless they intend to imprison me or kill me. But if they’re going to kill me or imprison me, what do they care what I think? I don’t know. It can’t be true. But if it is true, if what I saw is everywhere, then something is very right here.

Jogging around the grounds early in the morning, Belenko saw a little red convertible roar up the driveway at an imprudent speed and screech to a stop. That’s a crazy car. Whoever heard of a car without a top? The driver must be crazy, too. But what a girl!

Out stepped a voluptuous, lithe young woman, whose beguiling brown eyes and windblown auburn hair made her look wild and mischievous to him. Anna, as she called herself, spoke Russian melodiously and with the fluency of a native, but she was from the Midwest, having mastered the language in school and during travels in the Soviet Union. Her command of the contemporary vernacular, her seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of his homeland, and the skill with which she put him at ease, persuaded Belenko that she worked closely with the important Russians who had taken refuge in the United States.

Because she continuously studied the Soviet Union from perspectives denied him, Anna was able to fascinate and enlighten Belenko with facts and vistas he had not heard or seen before. Her revelations concerning the dissident movement and samizdat (underground) publishing in the Soviet Union as well as the number, diversity, and influence of Soviet nationals who had preceded him to the West surprised and heartened him. I am not alone then. Others have realized, too.

And her demonstrable understanding of the Soviet Union persuaded him that she might also understand him. She was the first person to whom he could release the accumulated and repressed thoughts, anger, hatred that had driven him away. Once the flow began, it swelled into a torrent, and Anna, who had indicated she would leave at noon, stayed the day to listen.