Derek Robinson - Hullo Russia, Goodbye England

“If I were Castro,” Skull said, “I’m sure I’d feel a lot more secure.”

“And if you were Kennedy, you’d feel a hell of a lot less secure. Suddenly a dozen US cities are within range of nuclear attack.”

“So is Moscow, and Berlin, and London, and Lincoln. We’ve learned to live with it.”

“Not the point. It’s the secrecy that’s got everyone spitting blood. Sneaky Commies trying to smuggle their missiles inside our defence. That makes Americans rise in wrath.”

“Wrath.” Skull took his glasses off and squinted unhappily at the blur of the diningroom. “Russians rose in wrath when Gary Powers’ U2 got shot down a thousand miles inside their borders.” Drinks arrived. “Sneaky Yanks,” Skull said. Leppard was more interested in his Scotch. “Wrath is bad for the brain,” Skull said. He put his glasses on. “Cuba isn’t going to launch any missiles. Castro’s not going to give the Pentagon an excuse to invade.”

“Then why all this nuclear muscle?”

“Why Operation Ortsac? Why the Bay of Pigs? Isn’t it just the Cold War to a Latin rhythm?”

“Not a hope,” Leppard said. “Either Castro gets his hired guns out of town or all hell breaks loose.”

“Goodness,” Skull said. “You sound just like John Wayne.”

“Well, Kruschev acts like Genghiz Khan. What do you expect? Lassie the Wonder Dog? America doesn’t respond kindly to threats.”

Skull could hear an undertone of anger. “I wasn’t thinking of kindness,” he said. “More of intelligent selfishness.” He could see their waiter approaching.

“I’ve got kin living in Washington. Cousins. What does this make them? Hostages?”

It wasn’t what Skull had hoped to hear. “The Soviets take a bit of knowing,” he said. “For instance, Genghiz Khan wasn’t Russian, on the contrary his Mongol hordes conquered Russia, they exploited it as a colony for three or four hundred years. One reason why Russia has always been rather sensitive about foreign pressures.” Leppard was eating his steak. “And so on and so forth,” Skull said. After that, they talked of other things until the meal was over and they were walking to their cars.

“I sometimes wonder how many of our crews would actually drop their bombs,” Skull said. He looked at the sky: a perfect autumn blue, made more perfect by a faint sketch of mackerel cloud.

“What’s to stop them?”

“Perhaps…” Skull hesitated, and took the risk. “A sense of right and wrong.”

“Isn’t that the same as a sense of duty?”

“Duty to whom? We tell our crews that the West will never make a first strike. So, when they’re scrambled for a second strike, they know they can’t make a difference. The catastrophe has happened. Will they really drop a hydrogen bomb? What will it achieve? Most aircrew are a decent lot. They’ll bomb for a better tomorrow, but what if there is no tomorrow?”

“Oh, no doubt about it, Skull,” Leppard said confidently. “There is no tomorrow. Never has been. Seize the day! And if it doesn’t deserve to survive, then cut its foolish throat. Thanks for lunch.”

The news, never good, got worse.

Kennedy and Kruschev swapped angry messages. The secretary-general of the United Nations tried to cool them down, asking Kruschev to stop all Soviet shipping to Cuba and asking Kennedy not to force a showdown. Both agreed; neither trusted the other. The codeword for American military alertness was DefCon, for Defense Condition. Kennedy upped it from DefCon 5 to DefCon 3, a big jump and a signal to Moscow as much as to the Pentagon. Half the Russian ships had stopped or changed course in mid-Atlantic; but construction work on the Cuban missile launch sites went ahead. If the work was completed, Kennedy might find he had a much weaker hand in this game of maniacs’ poker. He could order an air strike. Cuba was nearby. Kruschev would respond. Where? Maybe England. Why? England wasn’t far off, either. Nobody said that thermonuclear ping-pong had to make sense.

Skull sat in his office, watching the afternoon sun inch its way across the carpet. That could be the last sunlight half the world would ever see. He picked up the phone and called Bomber Command HQ. He had once gone trout fishing in the Aberdeenshire hills with an air commodore called Jenkins, now in Intelligence.

“Nobody is in a flap,” Jenkins said. “But here’s a funny thing. We monitor SAC transmissions, of course, and they’ve stopped using code for a lot of signals.”

“Plain English? I’ve never known SAC to do that.”

“And we know from cockpit transmissions that some SAC bombers are pushing their luck, flying beyond the points where they normally turn back, getting so close to Soviet airspace that Russian radar must think they look like trouble coming.”

“It’s provocative,” Skull said.

“So is firing a ballistic missile over the Pacific. Last night SAC launched an Atlas ICBM in California. It came down five thousand miles away, in the Marshall Islands, as planned. Russian radar must have picked up the launch. They didn’t know it was an unarmed test missile, not until SAC said so. In English.”

“And the Soviets believed them.”

“Well, they haven’t retaliated yet, so…”

“Hasn’t the SAC got anyone who speaks Russian?”

“Steady on, Skull. Now you’re being sensible.”

If anything is worse than the inexcusable, indelible knowledge of having committed murder, it is the bone-deep suspicion of probably having killed someone, not a stranger, without reason, and being unable to prove that it was a crime or a mistake or perhaps even that it hadn’t even happened. Many times before, Skull had suffered under the crushing weight of his own guilt. It was a dream, he knew that. He only murdered in his dreams, because that was where he was already trapped, imprisoned before he was captured. Now he broke out and lay sweating. His heart was playing rapid hopscotch.

He couldn’t sleep. He got up, washed his face, put on corduroy trousers and a windcheater, found his glasses, went out and did something he would never have done a week ago: he knocked on Silk’s door.

“You’re not Lana Turner,” Silk said. His voice was flat and tired from sleep. “I ordered Lana Gardner. Or maybe Piper Laurie. One of the two.”

“Awfully sorry.”

“Forget it. I had to get up anyway, some bastard was hammering on the door.” He yawned. “What’s wrong?”

“Well, it’s… Look, I know we’ve had our differences recently, but… ”

“Come in. Haven’t seen my wife, have you? Neither have I. Girl friend’s gone missing too.” He sat on the bed. “Women are an odd lot, Skull. You can’t pin them down.”

“I keep thinking about Cuba.”

“Oh, Christ. Bloody Cuba. Not here.” Silk pulled on his uniform over his pyjamas. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“It’s the principle of deterrence I worry about.” They went out. “Just when we need it most, it’s falling apart.”

“That happened to me, once,” Silk said. “Lost my marbles. In California.”

“Deterrence demands a form of balance. If one side persists in provocative behaviour, that balance is prejudiced and rational analysis goes out of the window.” Silk wasn’t listening. If Skull didn’t care how he lost his marbles in California, then he didn’t care what Skull chucked out of the window.

They walked to the camp cinema and back. Skull talked, urgently and fluently. Silk grunted from time to time. They reached his bedroom door.

“You see the dilemma,” Skull said. “Fear breeds fear.”

“Go to bed, Skull,” Silk said. “Go to hell, go to Cuba. Better still, go to Pulvertaft. He likes a good dilemma at four in the morning.” He went in and locked the door.