Chapter 3.

04/05/1992

 Blankenberg, standing by the window, glanced at the Panasonic on the coffee table, which had been playing a cassette with European pop music all this time. A little trick turned the songs into a kind of timer, which reduced the playback speed after the time had elapsed. Judging by this peculiar signal, the unit installed in the radio had finished transmitting the file to the satellite.

 The April snow, which had created a real winter fairy tale, had long since been soaked with melt water and turned into a slush splashing from under the wheels. Blankenberg, who had never been beyond the Urals even in his previous life, found it difficult to judge how atypical those truly winter days in April were, but the locals said that such a thing was rare.

 Pressing a button on the small remote control made the radio fall silent. How much simpler everything had become! A couple of decades ago, when he, then Moskvin, was settling into a new country, then the FRG, the entry of someone into an Eastern Bloc country with something more serious than a radio receiver would inevitably have attracted the attention of customs and then the secret services. All these transmitters, hidden in the sole and operating at the range of a portable radio, were not purely a movie invention. Blankenberg glanced at the portable Atari Portfolio standing there, near the radio. The computer was far from the latest technology, had a monochrome display with eight lines of text, but in conjunction with the Panasonic, or rather a covertly installed data transmission unit, it provided a reliable satellite communication channel, almost completely free from the threat of wiretapping and having a global range. In a couple of decades, the devices will be further improved and will become so accessible that a gadget that now seems unattainable can be found in the pocket of any ragamuffin, either here, or in the West, or in Asia. At the same time, the issue of transmitting any confidential information will no longer rest on the hardware, or some satellite equipment, but on software and encryption.

 To know how it will be, you did not need to have supernatural powers. So, the technology of today, of course, civilian, was quite accurately described in a number of articles published by technological flagships like the Massachusetts Institute. Ordinary people, unlike specialists, rarely read such publications. Blankenberg was interested, although it was not his specialty.

 Blankenberg, or rather Moskvin, spent the first twenty-five years of his life in the Soviet Union, not far from the capital. A village in the Smolensk region. He remembered his father vaguely - after the future Blankenberg turned seven, he never saw his father again - he disappeared, to use a Western expression, in the GULAG. A common story. His mother began to abuse alcohol and by the time it was time for Moskvin to go into the army, she had brought herself to such a state that it was already completely obvious to the young man that no one could fix anything here. Fortunately, his relatives initially prevented him from following his parents' crooked path - they all lived nearby in an urban-type settlement at the so-called state farm. Then he was "picked up" by the army, or rather, not a simple service, but a military school, communications. The same one with which the Soviets were worse off than the West from the very beginning to the very end. Sometimes it happens that the saying "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" does not work and everything turns out quite the opposite. For example, having seen enough of alcoholic parents, children can adhere to a completely different line of behavior. This was the case with Blankenberg. Having received an impeccable character reference upon graduating from the military academy, he was sent to the Western Group of Forces, to the GDR. Without any connections.

 A little over two years of staying at the very border with that almost otherworldly Western world, a piece of it, opened his eyes to many things, but in general did not influence his worldview, or any of the foundations of this worldview. At least, that's what it seemed to him.

 And then a miracle happened, he wouldn't have said it any other way now, in 1992. Back then, it was some kind of truly spontaneous, not entirely conscious impulse. Maybe his mind carefully hid all his discontent somewhere in a dark corner, under lock and key, and when the time came, when, figuratively speaking, a bright light struck, the lock came off, as was originally intended. Blankenberg often recalled this later and came to exactly this interpretation. A group of three officers was supposedly carrying out a routine check of communications in a closed part of the tunnels. In fact, they were carrying out some measurements as part of experiments with long lines – as far as the performers knew, the scientists were working on some methods of tracking the enemy's communications. In these intelligence games, they could not ignore any information, including such a trifle as remotely recording the enemy's energy consumption graph. At some point, the group dispersed. Blankenberg, that is, Senior Lieutenant Moskvin, was ordered to retreat one hundred and fifty meters and grab one of the cables with a device that resembled a claw - they used it to measure strong currents. The first measuring point was followed by a second one, even further away. It was then that Blankenberg noticed a small tunnel with a long-broken and rusted grate. Geographically, the tunnel went to the west. In addition, Blankenberg had a pretty good sense of direction, even though the available map-scheme was deliberately primitive and reduced to a scaleless sketch with letter landmarks, also applied to the walls. The solution suddenly ripened by itself. There was no tunnel on the map, although the existence of such passages, still preserved, was known. This was the fall of 1971. Over the following decades, the Eastern Bloc tirelessly identified such loopholes. His service in the Soviet Army ended with Blankenberg carefully placing the device on a cable rack and crawling through the grating.

 The tunnel, lined with old German bricks, was about one and a half meters high. Whether it was a tunnel of freedom or just a dead end from which he would have to return as quickly as possible so that no one would notice his absence, was unknown at that time. It was encouraging that the passage was dry and unobstructed. A couple of minutes later it became clear that it would be easier to explain if anything happened - the passage led to a much wider tunnel. Now everything could be explained by the fact that he allegedly detected suspicious activity in the first tunnel. The explanation was so-so, but at least it was something. To some relief, there were no rails in this fairly wide tunnel, so there was no need to fear an encounter with a train.

 Guided by the principle of going towards the barely perceptible current of air, Blankenberg finally reached the tracks. The very first train that rumbled past revealed a completely different color scheme in the lantern light than the usual one. It was West Berlin. All that was left was to calculate the interval between trains and get to the nearest technical room, not even to the station. However, it was necessary to know where it was. In all fairness, it was necessary to wait until nightfall and then walk at a calm pace, but here an almost paranoid thought was already spurring him on that he would be followed and, figuratively speaking, the door to an unknown but alluring world would slam shut right in front of his nose. It became clear later how stupid these fears were, but running along the tracks with an unknown result... This thought made him feel unpleasant every time for many years. Then it receded. Then, fortunately, everything turned out completely differently. Blankenberg, who had barely set foot on the tracks, stepped in order to look around, immediately discovered that the station from which the trains departed was within sight. This changed everything. Still, after waiting for a couple of trains to pass, he finally rushed there, towards the light. Less than an hour later, Blankenberg, who had left his weapon there, in the technical tunnel, was going up the escalator, accompanied by the astonished glances of those around him. This was the kind of Red invasion he had demonstrated to them then.

 Thus began his new life. He spent the first six months in Germany, then moved to the United States, where a little over a year later he got a job in the most ordinary police. It was there, in his first year in the United States, that his new name appeared. For some reason, he became convinced that living in America with such a "bast shoe and birch bark" surname would not be convenient for him, although most migrants did not see any problems in this. Going through various options, he came to a simple associative chain - "Moskvin - White Stone Moscow - Blankenberg". He communicated little with migrants - understanding their varieties was quite a science - the very first ones, who fled from the Soviet power, spoke some strange language, completely ignoring modern words and calling modern things as if they were aliens from the nineteenth, well, the beginning of the twentieth century. Well, that's how it was, and for them people like Blankenberg were just descendants of those rebellious ragamuffins who destroyed their beautiful Russia. Of course. With rampant tuberculosis, poverty and other such things that even Soviet propaganda was embarrassed to talk about because it would be utterly sordid. Although Blankenberg ran away from Soviet power, he did so not at all because he was fond of Russia, the image of which was very clearly outlined in the literature that was taught in school, in particular. All those letters to his grandfather in the village and other melancholy.

 There were also migrants from other waves, but Blankenberg didn't fit in there either - all those "Aunt Sonyas" and intellectuals.

 One way or another, having easily detached himself from the roots of his native culture, Blankenberg integrated into American life quite quickly and organically. Then he started earning money as a consultant for all these Sovietologists, who often surprised everyone with their knowledge, or rather their distortion.

 In 1976, five years after his escape, Blankenberg received an offer to work with a private foundation affiliated with the Agency. So, by the age of thirty, instead of drinking himself to death in his "backwoods village", Blankenberg, who had managed to be an officer in the Soviet Army, began his career in none other than the CIA.

 It is unlikely that his relatives, uncles, aunts, and grandparents, who had once prevented him from going down the drain, would have approved of this, but on the other hand, he had not killed anyone or stolen anything. He had stolen only himself from the country, from the Motherland, but that was just a play on words, although it could have caused sincere indignation in someone. One way or another, he did not experience any moral dilemma. And less than a year ago, his, Blankenberg's, story became almost an example to follow for most of his former compatriots. If you look into it, it became such even before 1991, but now the correctness of his actions could well be officially declared in the mass media. That's how it turned out.

 However, for Russia he was still a descendant of the first wave of emigration, a US citizen, born in the US and raised there. This was not his first visit - he had already visited the country as an interpreter for business delegations. He was also hatching plans to meet with relatives.

 The Union, the former Union, was surprising. For a number of years, the mass consciousness had been undergoing, if one could say so, a state similar to emotional burnout. Society was suspended for some time between the old system and the West. People did not believe in the old values, but they were not ready to reject them either. This was demonstrated by their referendum last spring. Nevertheless, not without slight initiating impulses, a readiness to reject these very values ​​appeared, and the gray monoliths of monuments flew off their granite pedestals. However, what the locals had arranged. Or rather, what they were ready for, left all previous "achievements" behind. By the way, the Lenin monument stood here as it stood, but this rather indicated that the image and everything connected with it had been devalued so much that people simply considered it unnecessary to make a fuss and remove the usual pedestal that marked the center of a regular rectangular area. That's right.

 Despite the fact that Blankenberg himself was part of the first "nuclear" team that arrived three days before the first "Boeing" that flew in from Helsinki, he could state with a fair degree of certainty that the Agency was not interested in the unfolding madness. It could, of course, be that the leadership had its own plan and its own considerations. Blankenberg was only a technical agent and his task was only the initial collection of information. However, his personal vision of the situation, both in Russia in recent months and globally, told him that the leadership was least of all interested in such a shaking up of an already shattered country, where they intended to transport nuclear weapons from the other republics and which, obviously, was intended to play the role of some kind of island of stability. Just look at the story of the plans to denuclearize Ukraine, oversaturated with former and active military personnel. Ukraine, which had every chance of becoming a hotbed of an entirely undesirable neo-Soviet renaissance, which could rely not only on broad groups of the former Soviet military class, but also on a powerful high-tech military industry. Seeing what the democratic path had led their northern neighbor to, they could well get the red banners that had been put away for a while out of the closets, and this was fraught with new trouble.

 Blankenberg spent his first day in Siberia in this gloomy Soviet hotel, where a landing party of three Americans like him was accommodated. That is, they were indeed US citizens, but just like Blankenberg, they had emigrated from the Union for different reasons. True, unlike Blankenberg, they did not change their names.

 The most recent of those who left left the country at the beginning of perestroika, so they did not even acquire the slightest accent, although they could have pretended to have something like that if they wanted. It was stupid, but it worked on the locals. In addition to the first, there was also the zero team, a truly "nuclear" team. This consisted exclusively of Russians who knew how to communicate in a specific way and who had never left anywhere, and who were tasked with ensuring the smooth implementation of a set of initial measures, which were allocated five days - from the first to the fifth inclusive.

 As was easy to understand, the provision consisted of giving the necessary amounts of money to the right people. Those people were obviously selected by people who knew their business, and there was no resistance from the local authorities.

 Of course, even such a deeply corrupted administration should have woken up sooner or later and to a certain extent already did, but much had already been done, and now the task of the official authorities to bring the situation back to normal had become much more complicated.

 Thus, on the first day, or rather the evening of the previous day, a military-style unit consisting exclusively of civilians entered the television center. Despite the fact that there was some kind of security system, represented by an agent working undercover as a technical specialist, everything went as planned - the money-backed sabotage led to a delay in response measures, and the counterattack, divided into several escalating stages, got stuck ineptly. Blankenberg even caught himself thinking that he should have felt ashamed for his former compatriots. In a couple of hours, two ten-foot parabolic antennas were deployed - ordinary civilian, although not cheap. The more practical military ones were abandoned for reasons of not adding extra fuel to the inevitable upcoming international incident. And although it was obvious to any competent specialist even in Russia that decommissioned military links could be purchased even cheaper than these new civilian ones, it was necessary to take into account the existence of hunters for cheap sensations and, most importantly, their brainless audience. Although, on the other hand, it was precisely this inexhaustible energy of human stupidity and gullibility that moved the implementation of the plan forward.

 The countless channels that the antennas received were cut by teams on duty around the clock, replacing each other every eight hours, which included a simultaneous interpreter. The latter were found in Russia, supposedly in the capital.

 The entire vast stream of television programs was reduced to just three channels that were new to the locals – so as not to scatter the audience's attention and to more easily control the materials. It must be said that for the locals, three new channels were already something of a breakthrough. When Blankenberg left the Union, such a breakthrough, as the real Marxists, immersed in their schizophrenia, liked to say, a quantitative and qualitative breakthrough, would have stunned even Moscow. Despite the success of the plan's implementation, Blankenberg could not have felt the same enthusiasm that the ordinary members of the group clearly showed. If the authorities had resisted in the first days, Blankenberg, as, one must assume, the leadership, would have considered such a scenario favorable. The most that would have threatened him would have been expulsion from the country. But if the plan, as outlined at the briefing, worked out as planned, no one would have thought it was a little. There will be no civil war, of course, but another round of economic failure, a political crisis, an aggravation of the already unhealthy social atmosphere - this is beyond any doubt. And this is only the most obvious, short-term. If Blankenberg could have any personal attachments to this country, then the leadership, of course, could not have such sentiments. Nevertheless, the crazy initiatives of the globalists and Rockwell in particular could have led to completely undesirable consequences for the United States. Both for those that existed and for those that were destined to appear. Even if this was a beautiful legend, launched with some of its own goals into the professional community. Well, for the existing USA. This was also quite enough. However, behind Rockwell stood such a force that even the intelligence community of the most powerful state was forced to reckon with. True, this force was also a part of this state. Such an equation, the solution to which, although it had one, was constantly moving into some kind of inaccessibility. The official declaration on TV of the intentions, which had been discussed for several days, about "exporting" a total strike to the rest of Russia was planned for the evening. The locals, it must be said, had a rather low threshold of readiness for such actions; in other words, it was not necessary to persuade them for long – the economic situation was appropriate. The report that Blankenberg typed on the keyboard of his "Atari" was devoted to this moral and psychological state, after which he dumped the text file into the "Panasonic". The sociological information itself was collected by a dozen members of the team, who looked quite organic against the local background, and who were assigned such a role within the framework of Rockwell's plan. On the first day, like everyone else, they handed out canned goods and Coca-Cola, on the second they had already dispersed to all sorts of dens of vice and bathhouses. Of course, they didn't hang around the streets of strangers on their own - petty local officials, including police officers, were happy to make friends with foreigners, who were perceived in the Soviet Union, albeit now former, as people of the highest rank. It was such an amazing topsy-turvy discrimination. In more than twenty years, Blankenberg had completely forgotten what it was like to see in a stranger something like a rich uncle who had fallen from the sky, ready to give you some valuable artifact for free, capable of elevating you above the rest. Maybe not seriously, only in friendly company, but to elevate. An advanced country, mother of it. Suddenly, the distinct roar of aircraft engines was heard. As if he had never seen a helicopter, and it definitely was a helicopter, Blankenberg again headed for the window. The roar grew louder and soon acquired a completely eerie, threatening character. And then something happened that Blankenberg did not expect at all. Red lights flew straight into the street. At first, the thought flashed that these were signal flares, but no - heat traps were flying into the street, at the houses and tree branches.

 Soon, one helicopter appeared in sight, judging by the trajectory, it was clearly not the one that had designated itself with lights. A military Mi-24 was flying somewhere to the southwest. The flight altitude barely reached fifty meters - Blankenberg determined this based on the high-rise buildings.

 - Oh, shit! They finally succeeded! - he muttered in English, after which he rushed to the computer. The event had to be reported immediately.