Gone Tomorrow

I said nothing.

Lila Hoth said, ‘I’m telling you the truth.’

I said, ‘I once saw a VAL Silent Sniper.’

‘You told me that already.’

‘I saw it in 1994,’ I said. ‘We were told it had just been captured. Eleven whole years after you claim it was. There was a big urgent panic, because of its capabilities. The army wouldn’t wait eleven years to get in a panic.’

‘Yes, it would,’ she said. ‘To unveil the rifle immediately alter its capture might have started World War Three. It would have been a direct admission that your soldiers were in direct face to face contact with ours, without any declaration of hostilities. Illegal at the very least, and completely disastrous in geopolitical terms. America would have lost the moral high ground. Support inside the Soviet Union would have been strengthened. The fall of communism would have been delayed, perhaps for years.’

I said nothing.

She said, ‘Tell me, what happened in your army, in 1994, after the big urgent panic?’

I paused, in the same way that Svetlana Roth had. I recalled the historical details. They were surprising. I checked and rechecked. Then I said, ‘Not very much happened, actually.’

‘No new body armour? No new camouflage? No tactical reaction of any kind?’

‘No.’

‘Is that logical, even for an army?’

‘Not especially.’

‘When was the last equipment upgrade before that?’

I paused again. Sought more historical details. Recalled the PASGT, introduced to much excitement and fanfare and acclaim during my early years in uniform. The Personal Armor System, Ground Troops. A brand new Kevlar helmet, rated to withstand all manner of assault by small arms fire. A thick new body-armour vest, to be worn either over or under the battledress blouse, rated safe even against long guns. Specifically, as I recalled, rated safe against incoming nine-millimetre rounds. Plus new camouflage patterns, carefully designed to work better, and available in two flavours, woodland and desert. The Marines got a third option, blue and grey, for urban environments.

I said nothing.

Lila Roth asked, ‘When was the upgrade?’

I said, ‘In the late eighties.’

‘Even with a big urgent panic, how long does it take to design and manufacture an upgrade like that?’

I said, ‘A few years.’

‘So let’s review what we know. In the late eighties you received upgraded equipment, explicitly designed for better personal protection. Do you think it is possible that was the result of direct stimulus derived from an unrevealed source in 1983?’

I didn’t answer.

We all sat quiet for a moment. A silent and discreet waiter came by and offered us tea. He recited a long list of exotic blends. Lila asked for a flavour I had never heard of, and then she translated for her mother, who asked for the same thing. I asked for regular coffee, black. The waiter inclined his head about a quarter of an inch, as if the Four Seasons was willing to accommodate all and any requests, however appallingly proletarian they might be. I waited until the guy had retreated again and asked, ‘How did you figure out who you are looking for?’

Lila said, ‘My mother’s generation expected to fight a land war with you in Europe, and they expected to win. Their ideology was pure, and yours wasn’t. After a swift and certain victory, they expected to take many of you prisoner, possibly millions of you. In that phase, part of a political commissar’s duties would have been to classify enemy combatants, to cull the ideologically unretrievable from the herd. To aid them in that task, they were made familiar with the structure of your military.’

‘Made familiar by who?’

‘By the KGB. It was an ongoing programme. There was a lot of information available. They knew who did what. In the case elite units, they even knew names. Not just the officers, but the enlisted men too. Like a true soccer fan knows the personnel and the strengths and the weaknesses of all the other teams in the league, bench players included. For incursions into the Korengal Valley, my mother reasoned that there were only three realistic options. Either SEALs from the navy, or Recon Marines from the Corps, or Delta Force from the army. Contemporary intelligence argued against the SEALs or the Marines. There was no circumstantial evidence of their involvement. No specific information. The KGB had people throughout your organizations, and they reported nothing. But there was significant radio traffic out of Delta bases in Turkey, and out of staging posts in Oman. Our radar picked up unexplained flights. It was a logical conclusion that Delta was running the operations.’

The waiter came back with a tray. He was a tall dark guy, quite old, probably foreign. He had an air about him. The Four Seasons probably put him front and centre because of it. His bearing suggested he might once have been a tea expert in some dark-panelled place in Vienna or Salzburg. In reality he had probably been unemployed in Estonia. Maybe he had been drafted along with the rest of Svetlana’s generation. Maybe he had endured the Korengal winters along with her, somewhere down the line in an ethnic grouping of his own. He made a big show of serving the tea and arranging the lemons on a plate. My coffee came in a nice cup. He put it down in front of me with elegantly disguised disapproval. When he was gone again Lila said, ‘My mother estimated that the raid would have been led by a captain. A lieutenant would have been too junior and a major would have been too senior. The KGB had personnel lists. There were a lot of captains assigned to Delta at the time. But there had been some radio analysis. Someone had heard the name John. That narrowed the field.’

I nodded. Pictured a massive dish antenna somewhere, maybe in Armenia or Azerbaijan, a guy in a hut, headphones on, rubber cups clamped tight on his ears, sifting through the frequencies, hearing the whine and screech of scrambled channels, stumbling on a fragment of plain speech, writing the word John on a pad of coarse brown paper. A lot of stuff is snatched from the ether. Most of it is useless. A word that you understand is like a nugget of gold in a pan, or like a diamond in a rock. And a word that they understand is like a bullet in the back.

Lila said, ‘My mother knew all about your army’s medals. They were held to be important, as criteria for classifying prisoners. Badges of honour, that would become badges of dishonour immediately upon capture. She knew that the VAL rifle would be worth a major award. But which award? Remember, there had been no declaration of hostilities. And most of your major awards specify gallantry or heroism while in action against an armed enemy of the United States. Technically whoever stole the VAL from my father was not eligible for any of those awards, because technically the Soviet Union was not an enemy of the United States. Not in the military sense. Not in a formal political way. There had been no declaration of war.’

I nodded again. We had never been at war with the Soviet Union. On the contrary, for four long years we had been allies in a desperate struggle against a common foe. We had cooperated, extensively. The World War era Red Army greatcoat that Lila Hoth claimed to have been conceived under had almost certainly been made in America, as part of the Lend-Lease programme. We had shipped a hundred million tons of woollen and cotton goods to the Russians. Plus fifteen million pairs of leather boots, four million rubber tyres, two thousand railroad locomotives and eleven thousand freight cars, as well as all the obvious heavy metal like fifteen thousand airplanes, seven thousand tanks, and 375,000 army trucks. All free, gratis, and for nothing. Winston Churchill had called the programme the most sordid in all of history. Legends had grown up around it. The Soviets were said to have asked for condoms, and in an attempt to impress and intimidate, they had specified that they should be eighteen inches long. The U.S. had duly shipped them, the cartons stamped Size: Medium.