SOVIET CLOSED CITY OF MIRAKOVO
19 FEBRUARY 1983
Shaking with horror at the obscenity he’d created, Comrade Professor K gulped down
the tumbler of vodka he’d just poured.
They called it a weapon to end all weapons. A weapon to end all war. But it was a
weapon of such horrific, calamitous, evil power it made nuclear bombs look like children’s
playthings. And now it was hours away from being shipped to Cuba.
On his cluttered desk, in a polished cherrywood presentation casket lined with red
velvet, lay a gold-plated Makarov pistol. A personal gift from Comrade General Secretary
Andropov. It was engraved, in typical Communist Party rhetoric,
For scientific services to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
‘A world without war is a world without fear.’
No more wars. Ever. That had been the dream for every Soviet citizen after the end of
the Great Patriotic War. Twenty-seven million dead. Countless others wounded. Who
wouldn’t want a world without fear?
But in Comrade Professor K’s humble opinion, a world with this, this thing in it was a
world that would one day be ruled by fear.
It was his job to prepare the device for shipment and its final destination aboard a
submarine.
Russian men had never been afraid to weep. He wept now.
He poured another tumblerful of vodka and downed it, so drunk now that he didn’t feel
the rough spirit burning his throat anymore.
Fresh tears coursed down his unshaven cheeks. What had he done?
They called it Mirotvorets. Peacemaker. Such irony. Unusual for the Kremlin. Ha!
Such jokers they were back in Red Square.
They should have called it Koshmar.
For Professor K had created a nightmare.
Not just for the Americans, though he could imagine all too easily the well-fed faces of
the actor president and his advisers paling as they realised what they were up against.
No. Not just for them. Professor K had birthed a nightmare for the whole of humanity.
General Secretary Andropov himself had appeared in the facility the previous morning.
He’d handed out vodka and Cuban cigars to the team before mounting an upturned packing
crate and beaming at the assembled weapons technicians, nuclear scientists, computational
biologists and engineers.
‘Thanks to your tireless work for the Mother Country, the Americans and their allies
will have no choice. They will surrender their entire nuclear arsenal or we will lay waste to
them and their running-dog enablers.’ The cold-eyed bureaucrat raised his glass. ‘To
Peacemaker!’
Cheering, they’d lifted their own glasses and swallowed the smooth, creamy vodka
rumoured to have come from a pre-revolutionary stash discovered inside the Romanovs’
Summer Palace.
Oh, Comrade Andropov was happy. His face shiny with Tsarist vodka. His reptilian
features wreathed in the sweet-smelling blue-grey smoke of his Monte Cristo.
But Professor K could see further into the future than the next Strategic Five-Year Plan.
And what he saw terrified him.
He was one of only seventeen people on the planet to have witnessed first-hand the
devastation Peacemaker could unleash.
Andropov had requested a demonstration. They’d travelled nine hundred and five miles
on a secret railway, all the way from Mirnakovo to another closed city.
Zarechinsk was a mining town. Uranium. But the seam was, like the group who arrived
at its station, exhausted. The town was scheduled to be mothballed, its 250,000 inhabitants
relocated at enormous cost.
In Andropov’s words, ‘Let’s catch two wolves in one trap.’
The country saying revealed his proletarian roots, a source of amusement among the
highly educated scientists who ran the Peacemaker programme.
Nobody felt much like laughing after seeing Peacemaker in action. White-faced, or
green and waxy, if they had been vomiting, they quietly boarded the train back to Mirnakovo.
In their wake, they left a quarter of a million human corpses, or what was left of them.
Men, women and children, mouths open in frozen screams, limbs twisted into bizarre knots.
And that… that …degradation of the flesh. He retched at the memory.
The entire grisly business had taken eleven minutes and fourteen seconds from the
moment Professor K’s index finger had flicked the activation switch to the final shriek.
No explosion had rent the sky, shivering glass from window frames or blowing out
eardrums. The whole thing had unfolded in eerie silence. Apart from the screams.
Birds had tumbled from the sky. Animals had collapsed, squealing, in the forest. And
the human beings unfortunate enough to have been sent to Zarechinsk to work had died
agonising deaths, of which their swiftness was their only redeeming feature.
Writhing, vomiting, voiding their bowels and bladders, clawing at their eyeballs as if
they couldn’t bear to see their own torturous ending, before their final and nerve-shattering
transformation into the grisly residue that was Peacemaker’s signature effect.
Andropov had been in high spirits on the return journey.
‘No radiation! No fallout! No buildings damaged. Not even a fencepost out of place!’
That night, a great deal of vodka had been drunk. The politicians were celebrating, the
scientists trying to obliterate the memories of Zarechinsk.
Meanwhile, 783 Tupolev Tu-22Ms flew due south from the Nagurskoye air base in
Arkhangelsk Oblast. Once over Zarechinsk they dropped over 3,000 tonnes of high-explosive
and incendiary bombs. It was said the orange glow of the fire could be seen in Moscow.
And now the professor was left alone in the research facility. The rest of the team had
shipped out, their suitcases laden with souvenirs, their necks bent under the weight of the
special solid gold medals struck to commemorate their work.
He took one final look at the shipment-ready olive-green steel casing designed to hold
Peacemaker. Glanced out of the window at the oily smoke curling up from a fire. Picked up a
photograph of his wife, Irina, and their son, Andrej, and kissed it. Returned it to the desk,
face down.
Then he picked up the gold-plated Makarov, put it to the underside of his jaw and pulled the
trigger.
SANTA ROSA, ATLANTIC COAST, HONDURAS
Gritting his teeth, the farmer swung the heavy-bladed sugar-cane knife. Unpleasant
memories of bodies mutilated by similar weapons crowded his mind. He shook them free
along with a spray of sweat.
The thick stem of the invasive weed they called, with typical Honduran irony, El
Alegre Gigante Verde – The Jolly Green Giant – separated with a snap, releasing a pungent
aroma of cat’s piss.
He was clearing a patch of land in which he intended to plant Arbol chillies. The work
was heavy, and painful, given the profusion of thorny, spiky or just plain poisonous scrub
plants that had claimed this corner of his smallholding.
He was content. Not happy. Happiness was an emotion he thought of as belonging to
his past. But here, tending his land, he could exist without wanting to kill himself with
alcohol. Or anyone else, with whatever weapon – fists, feet, knives, broken bottles, guns,
grenades – he felt necessary for the task.
Not that life was devoid of pleasure. He worked hard, growing mangos and papaya,
corn and chillies, enjoying the physical exhaustion that a day tilling the rich red earth would
bring.
Evenings were for reading or playing cards with his neighbours. He might spend some
time with Pera, his one, true friend. Or play football with her sixteen-year-old son, Santiago.
Go fishing. Or simply run from his home out along the beach, before swimming back. He
meditated. And did a twice-daily yoga practice, essential if he was to keep his demons at bay.
And for the most part, all these activities – physical, mental, spiritual – enabled him to
avoid thinking about his wife, and their unborn child who had died with her.
More than a year had passed. The people responsible were long dead. But for him, the
ghosts of the past were ever-present. Hovering just out of view in the corner of his eye.
Populating his dreams. And, at times of heightened stress, which he took pains to avoid, as
real to him as if they had never died.
At the hum of an approaching vehicle, the farmer straightened, wiped the sweat from
his forehead with a square of unbleached cotton and shaded his eyes against the harsh midday
sun. The knife dangled by his side, though his grip was sure.
The 4x4’s chrome trim sparkled like distant muzzle-flash. The black paintwork
gleamed. No dust. Odd. Most farmers round here had trucks tinted a tawny brown by the soil
they worked.
Visitors? Seemed unlikely. Most of his visitors arrived on foot. Or possibly horse- or
mule-back. Even then, it tended to be in the evening, when the day’s work was done.
Everyone was hard at it during the day. Mostly on the land. Like him.
He tightened his grip on the knife. The golok, his subconscious renamed it, using the
Malaysian word. The word they’d all used, back in the day.
The vehicle drew closer, slowing now. One man behind the wheel. Another in the
passenger seat. A long-billed cap for the driver and, for the passenger, a broad-brimmed hat,
casting deep shadows over their eyes. The lower edges of mirror shades rested on their
cheekbones.
The farmer cast a glance over his shoulder. The house was two hundred metres away.
His gun was two hundred metres away.
But not his safety. That, he carried with him.
He returned his gaze to the oncoming 4x4. A Lincoln Navigator. Space for eight. A
squad.
His pulse ticked up to seventy. He breathed in and out, slowly, returning it to sixty. The
men visible behind the windscreen were Anglos. So not cartel business, then.
It had been a year since he’d tangled with the Zinguizapa Cartel. Left them leaderless.
Rudderless, you could call it.
Rumour had it the Rio Rosso had taken over territory, operations and supply chain. Not
the human resources, though. That wasn’t cartel style. The crocs in the Rio Grande had eaten
well for a week.
The Navigator came straight towards him, its oversized tyres cutting furrows through
his newly planted maize. The farmer scowled. Didn’t they understand the care it took to raise
the damn stuff to maturity? It was bad enough fending off the peccaries, who pigged out,
literally, on the young plants.
No sense running. They could mow him down under the huge front wheels. No sense.
But no chance, either. He was not a man to run from danger. Towards it, maybe. Which his
old boss had occasionally upbraided him for, ‘Old Sport’. But away? No.
What happened next all depended on two factors. Numbers. And weapons.
Unarmed. Two on one? Four on one? Six on one? It didn’t matter. With the golok, he
was comfortable he’d send them on their way. Back where they came from. Or on to the great
and final destination of every human being.
Armed, things changed. There was an old saying. ‘Charge a gun, flee a knife.’ He
would get amongst them. Men wielding firearms were, on the whole, over-confident. Rush
them and that self-assurance evaporated faster than spilled water on a desert floor.
You could inflict a lot of damage with a golok in the middle of a group of panicking
gunmen, all fumbling for aim, snatching at slides and charging levers, trying to wield long-
barrelled weapons in confined spaces without shooting each other. He’d seen it happen. Even
ducked and let the bogies take a couple of their own side out before finishing the job himself.
But he was getting ahead of himself. Perhaps they’d come to sell him some young
mango trees. Or equipment insurance.
He smiled to himself. Nice to know he still had his sense of humour.
He glanced up as a thin keening reached him. A black-and-white swallow-tailed kite
soared on a thermal, describing vast, lazy circles over the land he tended.
The Navigator pulled up ten metres back from his position.
The front passenger door opened.
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