Ajax
Although Dr. Malenkov had said nothing to give away his age, I had developed a mental image of him as a distinguished-looking, elderly gentleman, balding and with a bit of a paunch, looking a lot like my grandfather.
But when I finally met Dr. Malenkov, I realized that I had been guilty of making assumptions in areas other than age. Rather than looking like my grandfather, she actually looked a lot more like my grandmother.
Like Grandma, Dr. Malenkov had stringy gray hair, her face was wrinkled and leathery. She had a slight stoop, and she leaned on a cane when she walked. But unlike my grandmother, Dr. Malenkov chain smoked and spoke with a voice so raspy that it was nearly a croak. She and Grandma had similar Slavic accents – Grandma spoke better English, but Dr. Malenkov was not too difficult to understand.
It was a chilly day, and the air was damp, somewhere between misty and drizzling. I had left my guide at the edge of the cemetery, where he'd pulled off the road and parked his blue Mercedes. I told him that I was going to wander off and explore the far reaches of the cemetery; he said that he'd poke around near the road for a while and then he'd wait for me in the car. I suggested that he might want to send a search party in after me if I wasn't back in an hour. I was smiling, but I'm not sure I was joking.
The cemetery had apparently suffered from decades of neglect, to the point where it looked more like a densely wooded lot than a graveyard.[3] I headed for our prearranged meeting place in the far corner, where Dr. Malenkov had assured me we could not be seen from the road. As I picked my way through the trees and the underbrush, I remember wondering whether not being able to be seen from the road was actually such a good thing.
But her warmth quickly put me at ease. She was transparently delighted to see me; she hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks. I seem to recall that she even reached up and tousled my hair, just like Grandma used to do.
She kept thanking me, over and over again, for the coded messages I'd sent her. I kept trying to explain that I really had nothing to do with them, but she waved away my protests. "You are so modest!" she exclaimed, shaking her head in wonder at the depths of my humility.
I was, at least, finally able to convince the good doctor that I had no knowledge of the content of the messages I'd sent her. As this realization sank in she became very businesslike, almost grim. "Then I have much to tell you," she said, "and little time." She handed me her cane and took my arm. It took me a few seconds to realize that I was holding her cane so she would have a free hand for her ever-present cigarette.
We strolled slowly back and forth at the edge of the cemetery. I noticed that she reversed direction every time we neared a point where we might be spotted from the road. We stopped walking just a few times, and then only so she could light a fresh cigarette. The brand on the pack didn't look familiar, but I did notice that the cigarettes were non-filtered. The smell of the smoke was acrid, like exhaust fumes. I was glad the air was thick and damp, so the smoke didn't swirl as freely as it might have on a clear day.
Fifteen years ago, Dr Malenkov told me, she had been involved in a program to create space-based nuclear weapons, they would be deployed on a fleet of orbiting satellites. The project was composed of small teams, and it was so compartmentalized that no team knew what any of the others were doing...
Wait, I said. Nuclear weapons in space? Don't we have treaties against that?
She rolled her eyes and continued. It seemed that she and a few of the other scientists had wanted to sabotage the project, but not at the cost of endangering their lives. They decided to create minor defects that were still within the specifications they had been given but which would create problems when it came time to mesh their work with that of the other teams. The scientists would be held blameless, because there was no way for them to know what the other teams were doing.
And that's where I came into the picture. The coded messages in my book had given Dr. Malenkov and her co-conspirators enough information to ensure that the U.S.S.R. would never be able to deploy their nuclear weapons in space. "But unlike our project," she continued, "the Ajax Project did succeed. And that is why you are here. Your government does not know Vanderoo reprogrammed the Ajax satellite..."
Wait, I said. The Ajax Project?
"The American project to deploy nuclear weapons in space," she explained, offhandedly. "Vanderoo reprogrammed Ajax. He controls it now, and he will use it on the night before next year. But one of Vanderoo's best men was associate of me. But he does not tell your government. He says if the Americans are stupid enough to launch satellites with nuclear weapons to space, they must pay the price. 'He who lives with the sword,' you know?"
Wait, I said. Vanderoo?
"Nicholas Vanderoo, the computer guy. Your CIA paid him to get Ajax free from Y2K problem. But instead, he reprogrammed it. And now you have real Y2K problem." A cigarette had been dangling from her lips, bouncing up and down as she spoke, but now she removed it, as if it were important that I see, as well as hear, what she was about to say.
"Nicholas Vanderoo controls four nuclear missiles," she said. She stopped walking and stared into my eyes, speaking with solemn emphasis. "Four. Nuclear. Missiles." She scanned my face for signs of comprehension. "Do you understand what I say?"
I was not so sure I believed it, but I thought I understood what she was saying. The CIA had hired a computer consultant named Nicholas Vanderoo to check our orbiting nuclear weapons to make sure they weren't susceptible to any Y2K issues. But instead of debugging them, he had reprogrammed them, and they were now under his control. Our government wasn't even aware of what he had done. A Russian nuclear scientist working for Vanderoo had told Dr. Malenkov about Vanderoo's plot, but he didn't plan to warn the U.S. because why the hell had we launched nuclear weapons into space in the first place?
I was pretty numb, and I think my voice was shaking, but I managed to relate my understanding to Dr. Malenkov. She nodded as I spoke. "Yes, good," she said, and nodded a few more times for emphasis. She took a long drag on her cigarette, exhaled slowly, and flicked the glowing stub into a pile of leaves. I remember thinking it was fortunate that the leaves were wet, as a brush fire might have been, shall we say, inconvenient.
"Yuri does not warn your government," she said, identifying her former colleague by name for the first time. "But I warn you," she added, poking my ribs with her free hand as she spoke. "So now is up to you..." poke "... to warn your people. Is up to you..." poke "...to make sure nuclear winter does not wrap its icy fingers around the throat of your motherland."
At least, that's what I think she said. Or, more accurately, that's how I remember what she said. It does sound a little melodramatic for a nuclear physicist, doesn't it? And I'm not sure her English was really good enough to allow her to evoke such a poetically stark image. I was more than a little shell-shocked at the time, and who knows, a few of my brain cells might have misfired during her speech. But I'm trying to relate these events as best I can, and that happens to be the way I remember Dr. Malenkov's impassioned plea.
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©2007 Henry Charles Mishkoff